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Submission + - Un-un-pentium on your Periodic Table of the Elements? (

PolygamousRanchKid writes: Researchers at Sweden’s Lund University have announced that they’ve been able to confirm the existence of element 115 on the periodic table. This research team isn’t the first to create element 115, which is currently known as ununpentium. The first claim that ununpentium had been synthesized in a lab was by a joint group of Russian and American researchers, who believed that they created it in their lab in 2004.

The Lund research team created ununpentium by bombarding americium(!?!?!) , which has 95 protons, with calcium, which has 20 protons. The bombardment created elements with 115 protons. The atoms were so unstable, however, that they decayed almost instantly. So to demonstrate that they had created element 115, the scientists had to actually measure the photons released by the atoms decay and confirmed that it matched what physics predicts would be the decay pattern for ununpentium.



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