The newest element on the periodic table is oganesson, element 118, first synthesized in 2006 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. It received its official name in 2016, when IUPAC (the international body that governs chemistry nomenclature) formally added it along with three other elements to complete the seventh row of the periodic table.
How Oganesson Was Created
You can’t find oganesson in nature. It exists only when scientists force it into existence inside a particle accelerator. The Russian-American team created it by firing calcium atoms at a target made of californium, a radioactive metal. When the nuclei of these two elements collided and fused, the result was an atom with 118 protons, the heaviest element ever produced.
The process is extraordinarily inefficient. Over the course of 1,080 hours of bombardment, using 16 quintillion calcium ions, the team produced exactly three atoms of oganesson. Each atom survived for less than a millisecond. The most stable form has a half-life of about 0.89 milliseconds, meaning it decays into lighter elements almost instantly. That fleeting existence makes oganesson nearly impossible to study, and it currently has no practical uses beyond basic research.
There was actually an earlier claim to element 118. In 1999, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced they had created it by smashing krypton into lead. That result turned out to be based on fabricated data and was retracted. The legitimate discovery came through a completely different method in 2002, with IUPAC confirming the results in 2015.
Four Elements Were Named at Once
Oganesson wasn’t the only new addition. IUPAC officially named four elements together in 2016, filling in the last gaps in the seventh row of the periodic table:
- Nihonium (Nh), element 113: First synthesized in 2004 by a team at RIKEN in Japan. It was the first element ever discovered in Asia, and its name comes from “Nihon,” the Japanese word for Japan.
- Moscovium (Mc), element 115: Named after the Moscow region where the Dubna research facility is located.
- Tennessine (Ts), element 117: Named after the state of Tennessee, home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
- Oganesson (Og), element 118: Named after Yuri Oganessian, a Russian-Armenian nuclear physicist who pioneered the techniques used to create superheavy elements.
The long gap between synthesis and official naming is normal for superheavy elements. Nihonium, for example, was first created in 2004, but the team needed additional confirmed events in 2005 and 2012 before IUPAC recognized the discovery at the end of 2015. The verification process requires independent confirmation that the element was genuinely produced and didn’t result from experimental error.
The Race for Elements 119 and 120
No new element has been confirmed since oganesson, but laboratories around the world are actively trying to change that. The competition to synthesize element 119 or 120 has become a genuine international race involving teams in Japan, the United States, Russia, China, and Germany.
Japan’s RIKEN Nishina Center is running its element 119 experiment around the clock. The team built a new ion separator called GARIS-II that uses five magnets to capture fusion products with twice the efficiency of earlier equipment. After construction delays and a pandemic-related shutdown, the experiment is now operating 24/7. The researchers’ dedication borders on superstition: at the start of each year, nuclear chemists Hiromitsu Haba and Kouji Morimoto slide exactly 119 yen into a collection box at their local shrine for good luck.
Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research invested $60 million into a dedicated Superheavy Element Factory in Dubna, originally planned to begin element 119 experiments in 2019. Meanwhile, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the U.S. is targeting element 120. In a key proof-of-concept milestone, LBNL became the first team to create element 116 using a titanium beam, an essential precursor to the method they plan to use for element 120. Based on those results, the lab estimates element 120 could be produced in roughly 220 days of beam time.
Germany’s GSI Helmholtz Center ran a four-month search for element 119 back in 2012 without success. Their researchers are now focused on smaller experiments to identify the best conditions for eventually producing element 120. Creating these elements is harder than anything that came before, because physicists are running out of suitable target materials and the probability of successful nuclear fusion drops as atomic numbers climb. Whichever team succeeds will open the eighth row of the periodic table for the first time.