Seaborgium

Element 106, seaborgium, was discovered by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. Scientists bombarded molecules of californium with oxygen ions. But there was a twist—scientists at the Soviet Union’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research claimed they’d found the element several months earlier!

It wasn’t until 1992 that an international committee decided the Soviet team’s research wasn’t convincing enough and gave credit for seaborgium’s discovery to the American team. The team named the element after Glenn Seaborg, an American chemist whose work helped redefine the scientific community’s understanding of the elements.

Seaborgium is an extremely radioactive element whose longest-lived isotope has a half-life of only around two minutes. Because seaborgium decays so quickly, scientists don’t know for sure what the element’s properties are. Analyzing seaborgium atoms is a little like watching for shooting stars—blink and you’ll miss them! However, scientists think that seaborgium has physical and chemical qualities comparable to tungsten, its neighbor in the periodic table.

It’s likely that in sufficient qualities, seaborgium would be silvery grey in color.

Seaborgium has no known non-research uses.

Despite its short half-life, several seaborgium compounds have been produced and studied, such as seaborgium oxyfluoride, seaborgium oxychloride, and seaborgium oxide.

Seaborgium has 13 have been reported isotopes. The longest-lived isotope, seaborgium-269, has a half-life of around two minutes. Many other seaborgium isotopes have half-lives of much less than one second!

Seaborgium is a synthetic element, meaning that as far as scientists can tell, it doesn’t occur in nature. In fact, only a few laboratories in the world can make seaborgium, and only a few atoms of the element have ever been produced. Seaborgium is made by bombarding the atoms of one element with the atoms of another inside a linear accelerator, like the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE).