Element 118 Created

BuzzSkyline writes, "The heaviest element yet, Element 118, has been created in Dubna, Russia by a collaboration of researchers from Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US. They created the new element by fusing together Californium (element 98) and Calcium atoms. The achievement comes five years after the scandal-plagued retraction of an earlier claim, which was based on fabricated data, that three atoms of element 118 had been produced at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The achievement was reported on October 9 in the journal Physical Review C (subscription needed to read more than the abstract)."

Re:A ways to go before element 137

[Anonymous Coward]

Neutron stars are just big nuclei, and they contain billions of billions of moles of nucleons. Though they contain few protons per neutron I would imagine there are a few out there with more than a mere 137 protons.

Instantiated?

[paulthomas]

Would it be more appropriate to say that element 118 has been successfully instantiated in a laboratory for the first time?

This is not a rhetorical question.

Re:do limitations on electrons count?

[drewzhrodague]

I'm not a particle physicist, but from what I can see, it's saying that the problem is that some of the electrons would have to be moving faster than the speed of light.

I also understand that if you take a specified ammount of one of those desnse artificial elements, you can exert a force upon it, and it is part of the aparatus that helps us travel (in a vehicle) faster than light.

Not that I have any proof or anything, but this is what some of those alien conspiracy-thoerists believe. Here's a link to Billy Meier [wikipedia.org], one of the contactees. I think I actually have a copy of some of the analysis on the metal samples on a green DVD here.

Also, I've been paying attention to Gravity Probe B [wikipedia.org] and Gravity Probe B [stanford.edu], which I think is a closer step -- noticing strange things about gravity.

Yes, I do want to get off this planet as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, once again

[Frumious Wombat]

it's not stable enough to detect except by its decay chain. It would be nice if they would work on getting over the hump to the next island of stability, so that we could bag these things in an ion trap, and measure their mass directly. OTOH, if this keeps physicists occupied and out of the bars, I'm all for it.

Re:It's the innermost electrons that have the prob

[Xtifr]

It's the innermost electrons that have the problem? Are you sure about that? I would expect that the outermost electrons would have the farthest to travel, and would therefore need the greatest speed, so removing electrons from the outer shells would solve the problem. The outer electrons are higher energy, and I would assume that this is partly related to them having higher velocity. But I can see arguments for the other way around too, and I don't know which is correct.

I agree that electron capture is another interesting issue here. And it is curious that 137 is the nearest whole number to the inverse of the fine structure constant.