Nihonium

Nihonium is one of the newest elements to be discovered. Don’t try to find nihonium anywhere in nature, though—it only exists in laboratories!

In the second half of the 20th century, scientists around the world were working to synthesize new elements. They did this primarily by bombarding “targets” of one element with atoms of another element, hoping to cause the nuclei to fuse and make a third, entirely new element. In 2003, a team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia, working in collaboration with the United States’ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, claimed to have discovered element 113 by this method.

However, the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party—which includes scientists from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP)—felt that the JINR team hadn’t provided sufficient evidence that they actually created element 113. Instead, in 2015, credit for the discovery was awarded to a team from the Japanese research institute Riken, which had synthesized the element in 2004. The Riken team named element 113 after Nihon, one of two Japanese words for Japan.

Because so little nihonium has ever been created, and because nihonium is highly radioactive—meaning that its molecules decay quickly—scientists can’t say for sure what the element’s properties are. It’s thought that nihonium is a noble metal that has qualities in common with elements in the same periodic column—indium, boron, and aluminum—and that is denser than thallium. 

Nihonium has no known non-research uses.

Nihonium isn’t naturally occurring. Eight nihonium isotopes have been reported, all of which are highly radioactive: nihonium-278, nihonium-282, nihonium-283, nihonium-284, nihonium-285, nihonium-286, nihonium-287, and nihonium-290.

The most stable (non-radioactive) of these is nihonium-286, which has a half-life of around nine seconds.

Nihonium is only produced in laboratories and is not known to exist in nature.