Roughly 24 to 26 elements on the periodic table are considered man-made, depending on where you draw the line between “synthetic” and “natural.” The periodic table currently ends at element 118, oganesson, and about 90 of those elements occur naturally on Earth, with uranium (element 92) generally regarded as the heaviest naturally occurring one. Everything above uranium was first created in a laboratory, and a handful of lighter elements were also synthesized before anyone found them in nature. The exact count shifts because the boundary between natural and artificial is blurrier than most people assume.
Why the Count Is Not a Single Clean Number
The simplest version of the answer would be: take all 118 confirmed elements, subtract the roughly 90 that exist naturally, and you get about 28 synthetic ones. But that math gets messy fast. The periodic table contains about 90 naturally occurring elements ending with uranium, and researchers have synthesized roughly 25 more beyond it.1The Periodic Table. Synthetic Elements The trouble is that several elements originally created in labs turned out to exist in nature after all, just in vanishingly small quantities. Neptunium (93) and plutonium (94) are the best-known examples, but trace amounts of elements up through californium (98) have since been detected in uranium ores and other natural settings.2Research Starter. Man-Made Elements So are those elements man-made or natural? Technically both. They were synthesized first and discovered in nature later, and the amounts found naturally are so tiny that for all practical purposes they exist only because we create them.
Then there are two oddities below uranium on the periodic table: technetium (43) and promethium (61). These sit among the lighter elements yet have no stable isotopes, meaning they effectively don’t accumulate in nature over geological time. Both were first produced artificially. Some textbooks count them as synthetic, others exclude them because trace quantities do form naturally through uranium decay or cosmic ray interactions. The answer to “how many elements are man-made” lands somewhere between 24 and 28 depending on which of these edge cases you include or exclude.
The First Elements That Had to Be Built
Long before physicists started chasing superheavy elements in the triple digits, chemists noticed two stubborn gaps in the periodic table. Element 43 had been predicted by Mendeleev but refused to show up in any mineral sample anyone could find. It was finally produced in 1937 when Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè identified it in scrap metal parts from a cyclotron at Berkeley, California, which Ernest Lawrence had mailed to them in Palermo, Italy.3PubMed. Technetium, the missing element They named it technetium, from the Greek word for “artificial,” making it the first element deliberately produced by humans. Today, technetium-99m is one of the most widely used isotopes in medical imaging, injected into millions of patients each year for diagnostic scans.
Element 61 took a bit longer. Promethium, the last lanthanide to join the periodic table, was isolated in 1945 by Jacob Marinsky, Lawrence Glendenin, and Charles Coryell, who pulled the radioactive isotopes out of uranium fission products at what is now Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.4PubMed Central. Promethium: To Strive, to Seek, to Find and Not to Yield The discovery wasn’t made public until 1947, likely because of wartime secrecy around nuclear research. Promethium has found some niche uses in luminous paint and as a beta-radiation source for thickness gauges, but its short-lived isotopes make it impractical for most applications.
Building Elements Heavier Than Uranium
The real explosion in synthetic element creation happened after World War II, when researchers began systematically extending the periodic table past uranium. The basic idea behind all of this work is nuclear transmutation: smash atomic nuclei together with enough energy and, occasionally, they fuse into a heavier nucleus that didn’t exist before. Rutherford first demonstrated the principle by bombarding nuclei with protons, and Fermi realized that neutron bombardment could create elements beyond what nature provides.5Oxford Academic. 5. The atom factories: making new elements
Neptunium (93) and plutonium (94) came first, in 1940 and 1941. Then came a steady march through the actinides: americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, and lawrencium, all produced between the mid-1940s and early 1960s. Einsteinium and fermium were discovered under dramatic circumstances, identified in the fallout debris of the first thermonuclear weapon test in 1952. The intense neutron flux of the explosion had driven uranium atoms through a rapid chain of neutron captures and beta decays, creating elements that no lab reactor had yet managed to produce.
From element 104 onward, the elements are collectively known as the transactinides or superheavy elements, and creating them required a different approach. Instead of neutron bombardment, researchers began firing beams of lighter atoms at heavy targets. Laboratories in Russia, the United States, Germany, and Japan became the main players, each contributing discoveries through the 2000s and 2010s. The most productive campaign in recent decades used beams of calcium-48 fired at various heavy actinide targets, a strategy that led to the discovery of five new elements and over 50 new isotopes since the year 2000.6The European Physical Journal A. Actinide targets for the synthesis of superheavy nuclei
How an Element Gets Its Name
Creating a new element and getting official credit for it are two different things. The process for confirming and naming a new element is governed by IUPAC (the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) together with IUPAP (the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics). A joint working group evaluates the experimental evidence, and only after the discovery is confirmed are the discoverers invited to propose a name and symbol.7IUPAC. How to Name New Chemical Elements
The naming rules allow elements to be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property, or a scientist. The name’s ending has to follow a convention that preserves chemical consistency: elements in groups 1 through 16 end in “-ium,” group 17 elements end in “-ine,” and group 18 elements end in “-on.”7IUPAC. How to Name New Chemical Elements That is why element 118 is oganesson (named after physicist Yuri Oganessian), not oganessite or some other suffix. Before official naming, new elements carry temporary placeholder names based on their atomic number, like “ununoctium” for 118.
This process can take years, and historically it has been contentious. During the Cold War, rival claims between American and Soviet laboratories over who discovered certain elements led to decades-long naming disputes. Element 104, for instance, was called rutherfordium by the Americans and kurchatovium by the Soviets, and the disagreement dragged on until IUPAC finally settled the matter in the 1990s. The formalization of the discovery and naming process was partly a response to these political feuds.
Why Superheavy Elements Vanish Almost Instantly
One thing that strikes people about synthetic elements is how fleeting they are. Oganesson, element 118 and the heaviest element with conclusive evidence of creation, has been produced in just a single isotope form, and its half-life is less than a millisecond.1The Periodic Table. Synthetic Elements A few atoms appear, exist for a fraction of a second, and then decay into lighter elements. You cannot collect a visible sample or put it in a jar.
The reason comes down to the forces inside the nucleus. Protons repel each other because they all carry positive charge, and the more protons you pack in, the harder it is for the nuclear strong force to hold everything together. Past a certain point, the nucleus becomes so unstable that it either splits apart (spontaneous fission) or sheds particles (alpha decay) almost immediately. The heaviest isotopes of elements 110, 112, and 114 produced in calcium-48 reactions undergo alpha decay, while spontaneous fission becomes increasingly dominant in the superheavy region.8Radiation Physics and Chemistry. Towards the “islands of stability” of superheavy elements
This extreme instability is why studying superheavy elements’ chemistry is so difficult. Even for elements 115 through 118, the longest-lived known isotopes are so short-lived that entirely new experimental approaches are needed to learn anything about their chemical behavior.9EPJ Web of Conferences. Advances in chemical investigations of the heaviest elements Researchers have nevertheless managed to probe the chemistry of some of these elements using single-atom-at-a-time techniques. In one landmark experiment, a team created atoms of seaborgium (element 106) and directed them through a stream of carbon monoxide and helium, producing what they concluded was a hexacarbonyl compound, essentially confirming that seaborgium behaves somewhat like its lighter cousins in the periodic table.10Science. Synthesis and detection of a seaborgium carbonyl complex
When the Periodic Table Stops Being Periodic
One of the more fascinating consequences of pushing the periodic table into superheavy territory is that the elements don’t always behave the way their position on the table predicts. In lighter elements, the periodic table works beautifully: elements in the same column (group) share similar chemical properties. But for superheavy elements, electrons are moving so fast that relativistic effects from Einstein’s special relativity begin to matter. These effects change how electrons orbit the nucleus, which in turn changes bonding behavior and chemical properties.
A striking example comes from group 6 on the periodic table, which includes chromium, molybdenum, and tungsten. When two atoms of these lighter elements bond to each other, they form a bond with a very high multiplicity. But for seaborgium (element 106), which sits in the same group, calculations show that relativistic effects reduce the bond multiplicity of an Sg-Sg pair dramatically compared to its lighter relatives, effectively breaking the pattern that the periodic table predicts.11PubMed. Relativistic Effects Break Periodicity in Group 6 Diatomic Molecules The same trend shows up for other superheavy elements including rutherfordium, dubnium, bohrium, and hassium. In other words, the deeper you go into synthetic territory, the less reliable the periodic table becomes as a guide to what an element will actually do chemically. The table still organizes these elements by atomic number, but the neat column-by-column similarities that students learn start to fray.
The Island of Stability
If every superheavy element decayed in microseconds and there was no prospect of finding longer-lived ones, the whole enterprise of element creation might feel purely academic. But theoretical physicists have predicted for decades that there should be an “island of stability” somewhere among the superheavy elements, a region where certain combinations of protons and neutrons produce nuclei that are far more stable than their neighbors. The idea is rooted in nuclear shell theory: just as atoms with filled electron shells (like the noble gases) are chemically stable, nuclei with “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons are predicted to be more tightly bound and longer-lived.
Where exactly this island sits is still debated. Different theoretical models point to different magic numbers. Some analyses support proton number 120 and neutron number 184 as the strongest candidates for the center of the island.12Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. Establishing the island of stability for superheavy nuclei via the dynamical cluster-decay model applied to a hot fusion reaction 48Ca + 238U → 286112* Others identify a whole landscape of “quasi-magic” numbers, with one comprehensive calculation identifying 36 quasi-magic proton numbers and 53 quasi-magic neutron numbers contributing to 133 potential deformed islands of stability across a vast range of nuclei.13Chinese Physics C. Islands of stability and quasi-magic numbers for super- and ultra-heavy nuclei A separate approach using geometrical packing models has independently arrived at candidate magic numbers that match both experimental findings and sophisticated computational results, lending some confidence that the concept is real even if the precise location remains uncertain.14Annals of Nuclear Energy. A new approach to finding magic numbers for heavy and superheavy elements
There are already hints that the island is not a fantasy. Some isotopes of flerovium (114) and nearby elements have half-lives measurably longer than their neighbors, suggesting that the stabilizing effect of approaching a magic number is real, even if no one has yet reached the predicted center. If the island’s core could be reached, the resulting isotopes might last seconds, minutes, or even much longer, enough time to study their chemistry in meaningful detail and potentially even find practical uses.
The Race to Element 119 and the Bottlenecks Ahead
The periodic table currently ends at 118, and labs around the world are now competing to be the first to produce element 119. Japan’s RIKEN laboratory has taken a leading role in this effort.15PubMed Central. How Japan Took the Lead in the Race to Discover Element 119 But the jump from 118 to 119 is harder than many of the previous steps, for reasons that go beyond pure physics.
The main bottleneck is the target material. The calcium-48 beam strategy that proved so successful for elements 113 through 118 relied on heavy actinide targets, and these target materials can only be produced by intense neutron bombardment in very high-flux reactors, followed by chemical processing in specialized facilities that exist in only a handful of places worldwide.6The European Physical Journal A. Actinide targets for the synthesis of superheavy nuclei For element 119, the target would likely need to be something even heavier or rarer than what was used before, and the production cross-sections (essentially the probability that any given collision actually produces the desired element) get smaller with every step up in atomic number. Researchers might need to run beams for months or years to detect a single atom.
There is also a theoretical question hanging over the effort: will element 119 start a new row of the periodic table, and if so, will it behave like an alkali metal as its position would suggest? Given what we know about relativistic effects disrupting periodicity in the superheavy region, there’s genuine uncertainty about whether the familiar column-based predictions will hold. Creating element 119 would not just add a line to the periodic table; it would open an entirely new row and potentially reveal whether the organizational logic of the table itself has a limit.
What Synthetic Elements Are Actually Used For
Most people hear “man-made element” and picture something exotic and useless, atoms that blink in and out of existence in particle accelerators. That’s accurate for the superheavy elements above about 103, but several of the lighter synthetic elements are genuinely useful and produced in significant quantities.
Technetium is the standout. Technetium-99m is the workhorse of nuclear medicine, used in tens of millions of diagnostic imaging procedures annually worldwide. It emits gamma rays at an energy ideal for medical cameras, has a half-life of about six hours (long enough for imaging, short enough to limit radiation dose), and can be chemically attached to a variety of molecules to target specific organs. The global supply comes from nuclear reactors, and periodic shortages when aging reactors go offline for maintenance have caused real disruptions in healthcare.
Plutonium-238 powers deep-space missions. NASA’s Voyager probes, the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, and the New Horizons spacecraft that flew past Pluto all run on radioisotope thermoelectric generators fueled by plutonium-238. Its heat output per gram is high, it lasts for decades, and it doesn’t need sunlight, making it irreplaceable for missions far from the Sun. Americium-241 is in virtually every household smoke detector, where its alpha radiation ionizes air in a small chamber to detect smoke particles. Californium-252 is used as a portable neutron source for things like detecting gold and silver in ore, analyzing coal quality, and starting up nuclear reactors.
For the superheavy elements above lawrencium (103), there are no practical applications yet. Their lifetimes are too short and the quantities produced too small. But that doesn’t mean the science is without purpose. Each new element tests our understanding of nuclear physics and quantum mechanics at extremes. The relativistic chemistry findings, for instance, are relevant to how we model the behavior of heavy atoms in general, including practical elements like gold and lead whose chemistry is also shaped by relativistic effects. And if the island of stability holds isotopes with meaningful lifetimes, entirely new applications could emerge that nobody has imagined, in much the same way that technetium went from a physics curiosity in 1937 to the backbone of diagnostic imaging within a few decades.