If you are a Star Trek fan, you may know of dilithium, the crystalline element (with an atomic number of 119) that powers future space vessels, having been discovered on a moon of Jupiter or in a meteorite at the South Pole (depending on which episode you watch). Of course, the writers made that up (as did the writers of the Batman comic, whose plot relied on the discovery of element 206, batmanium) – but the search to find the real element 119 and other super-super-heavy elements really is underway. These will be extraordinarily difficult to create, as they will involve bombarding atoms with particles, possibly for years, to find just a few atoms of the new element (which will be tremendously unstable and will rapidly decay). The Japanese RIKEN team, in collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, believe they can possibly do it by bombarding curium with vanadium ions. Yuri Oganessian’s team in Russia are planning an attempt using berkelium, which they will bombard with titanium ions.
Carl Sagan once said that ‘we are made of star stuff’, expressing the sheer wonder of how all of the elements were created in the Big Bang, or in nuclear reactions in stars and supernovae, then swirled around in space and came together to form everything in our world, both living and inorganic, including every molecule in our bodies.
Before 1669, we only knew of twelve elements. By the end of the eighteenth century we knew of thirty-four. Mendeleev’s periodic table included the sixty-two elements that were known at the time. And now we know about each of the first 118, including all naturally occurring elements on our planet, and we are still not satisfied, because of the natural human inclination to keep on trying to do more, go further, and reach out for the stars.