The Newest Kids on the Periodic Table Had to Survive for Just a Millisecond to Make History
This website is named after an element that no longer exists — at least, not by that name. Unununium was the placeholder name for element 111, a temporary label built from Latin roots meaning "one-one-one." In 2010, it was officially renamed copernicium (Cn), honoring astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. That naming journey — from numerical placeholder to permanent tribute — is a perfect window into how the very last chapter of the periodic table got written.
Because between 2004 and 2016, a small international community of nuclear physicists did something that sounds almost fictional: they created new elements from scratch. Not discovered hiding in a mineral or extracted from seawater. Created — assembled atom by atom inside particle accelerators, existing for fractions of a second before decaying into lighter elements. And in 2016, four of them received official names, completing the seventh row of the periodic table for the first time in history.
Meet elements 113 through 118.
What Even Is a Superheavy Element?
Before we get to the naming ceremony, it helps to understand what we're dealing with. Every element on the periodic table is defined by the number of protons in its nucleus — hydrogen has 1, carbon has 6, gold has 79. The "superheavy" elements are those with 104 or more protons, and they don't occur naturally on Earth. They have to be manufactured.
The basic recipe goes like this: take a heavy target element, fire a beam of lighter ions at it inside a particle accelerator at enormous speeds, and hope that the nuclei fuse together rather than just bouncing off each other or shattering. The probability of a successful fusion is vanishingly small — sometimes scientists fire beams for months and detect only a handful of new atoms. And those atoms, once created, typically decay within milliseconds, sometimes microseconds.
Yet that's enough. Even a single atom, detected once, can be confirmed through its characteristic decay chain — the sequence of lighter elements it breaks down into. If the pattern matches predictions, you've got a new element on your hands.
The Race for 113: Japan's Decade-Long Quest
Element 113 has one of the most compelling origin stories in modern chemistry. While Russian and American teams at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California were synthesizing elements 114 through 118 in a productive collaboration, element 113 became a separate, quieter competition.
A team at RIKEN, Japan's national research institute, spent nearly a decade — from 2004 to 2012 — firing beams of zinc-70 at bismuth-209 targets. They detected just three atoms of element 113 over all those years. Three. But the data was unambiguous, and in December 2015, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) awarded naming rights to RIKEN.
The Japanese team named it nihonium (Nh), from Nihon, the Japanese word for Japan. It was the first element discovered in Asia to receive an official name, and it was a moment of genuine national pride. Element 113 now carries an entire country's identity in its two-letter symbol.
Moscow, Tennessee, and a Physicist Named Oganessian
The remaining three elements — 115, 117, and 118 — were named in a single sweep in 2016, and their names reflect the geography of the labs that made them.
Moscovium (Mc, element 115) honors the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, home to the JINR facility in Dubna where so much of this work was done. It's a fitting tribute to decades of Russian nuclear research.
Tennessine (Ts, element 117) recognizes the state of Tennessee, where Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University played key roles in the element's synthesis. It's only the second element named for a U.S. state (the first being californium, element 98), and folks in Tennessee have every right to be proud.
Then there's oganesson (Og, element 118), and this one's special. It was named after Yuri Oganessian, a still-living Armenian-Russian physicist who has been the driving force behind superheavy element research for decades. Elements are almost never named after living people — the tradition is to wait. But IUPAC made an exception, recognizing Oganessian's singular contributions to the field. He joins Glenn Seaborg (seaborgium, element 106) as one of only two scientists to have an element named after them during their lifetime.
Oganesson is also noteworthy for another reason: as element 118, it sits in the noble gas column of the periodic table — the same family as helium, neon, and argon. Theoretically, it should be chemically inert. But some models suggest oganesson might actually behave nothing like a noble gas at all, because at that atomic mass, relativistic effects (the same physics Einstein described) start distorting electron behavior in strange ways. We can't test this easily, because oganesson atoms last only about 0.89 milliseconds before decaying. Science has a sense of humor.
From Unununium to Copernicium: How Naming Conventions Evolved
This is where our website's origin story ties back in. For much of the 20th century, when new heavy elements were synthesized faster than naming committees could act, IUPAC used a systematic placeholder system: Latin and Greek roots for the digits of the atomic number, followed by "-ium." Element 111 was un-un-ium (1-1-1). Element 116 was ununhexium. Element 118 was ununoctium.
These names were never meant to be permanent — they were bureaucratic placeholders, like "TBD" in a spreadsheet. Once naming rights were confirmed and official names approved, the placeholder vanished. Unununium became copernicium in 2010. Ununhexium became livermorium (Lv, element 116) in 2012, honoring Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And so on down the line.
The current naming rules allow elements to be named after mythological concepts, minerals, places, countries, or scientists. What they can't be is arbitrary or promotional — IUPAC has a review process, and proposed names go through months of public comment before approval. The periodic table, it turns out, has editorial standards.
Why It Matters That These Elements Exist at All
Fair question: if these elements last milliseconds and can't be held, touched, or used for anything practical, why does their synthesis matter?
For one thing, every new superheavy element tests and refines our models of nuclear structure. Scientists are searching for what they call the "island of stability" — a theoretical region of the chart where superheavy elements might have significantly longer half-lives due to certain "magic" numbers of protons and neutrons. Finding that island could eventually lead to superheavy elements stable enough to study chemically, with properties that might be genuinely novel and useful.
For another, the act of creating something that has never existed anywhere in the observable universe — even for a millisecond — is a profound demonstration of what human curiosity and collaboration can achieve. Japanese, Russian, and American scientists, working across geopolitical tensions, completed a map that Mendeleev started sketching in 1869.
The periodic table's seventh row is full. The story, though, is just getting started.
Curious about the element this site is named after? Check out our full profile on copernicium — formerly known as unununium — and the legacy of element 111.
