The Element from the Island of Stability - Hiding In Plain Sight?

How's that for a movie title?

Here's the skinny: Israeli scientists found a new element. A really heavy one.

Finding elements was a big deal prior to the 20th century. Interest tapered off because of nuclear fission: once elements get too heavy they break apart quickly on their own.

Work has continued on this because new elements might have interesting new chemical properties. But, they've been creating them the hard way - with expensive labs and materials.

Enter the island of stability. It has been hypothesized for quite some time that the nuclear instability of elements past around 90 might end when we got up around element 120.

The thing is, how do we find such an element?

Cheap science is often elegant science, and in this case the Israeli led team decided to take stability at face value: if the island of stability really exists, atoms of those stable elements should be sitting around already, just waiting to be found.

So they took some thorium (element 90, and still pretty common) and weighed every single nucleus. They found lots of thorium, lots of other trace contaminants, and several nuclei consistent with either element 122 or 124.

Extrapolation shows that a pound or so of thorium appears to contain literally billions of these super-heavy nuclei.

The working name for the stuff they found is ununbibium.