IUPAC Announces Provisional Names for the 4 Newest Elements in the Periodic Table

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) Inorganic Chemistry Division has recently released the list of provisional names for the four newest elements in the periodic table.

The Provisional Recommendation for the names and symbols of the recently discovered four superheavy elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 are not yet official and still on a five month probation period, in which it will be under public review.

Elements 113, 115 and 117 were named to honor Japan, Moscow and Tennessee respectively, while element 118 will be named after a Russian Scientists.

"The IUPAC Inorganic Chemistry Division has reviewed and considered these proposals and recommends these for acceptance. A five-month public review is now set, expiring 8 November 2016, prior to the formal approval by the IUPAC Council," the council wrote on their site.

The proposed name for element 113 is Nihonium with the symbol Nh. "Nihon" is one of the two ways to say Japan in Japanese, which translates as "the Land of the Rising Sun". The name was proposed by the discoverers at RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Japan.

On the other hand, elements 115, 117 and 118 were discovered by a Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, according to CNN.

Elements 115 and 117 were named Moscovium with symbol Mc and Tennessine with symbol Ts respectively. These were done to honor Moscow and Tennessee where the two super heavy elements were synthesized.

Meanwhile, element 118 was proposed to be named Oganesson with symbol Og, after Yuri Oganessian, in recognition for his pioneering contribution in the field of superheavy element research.

All the four recently discovered superheavy elements synthetically created in laboratories and cannot be found in nature. These elements were discovered using the "hot fusion" approach, which involves heavy ion reactions of an intense, high-energy calcium beam on rare actinide targets including berkelium and californium at the Dubna Gas-Filled Recoil Separator.