THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 19, 1994 TAG: 9411190410
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BERLIN LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
It took 10 years to make, and flickered into existence for less than a thousandth of a second. Still nameless, element 110 supplies another clue to the world's creation.
An international team at the Heavy Ion Research Center at Darmstadt in southern Germany said it created the first atom of the element by bombarding lead atoms with nickel atoms in the center's accelerator. Scientists once thought uranium - No. 92 - was the last of the elements. But in the last half-century, researchers equipped with nuclear theories and technology have succeeded in detecting 18 more, each heavier than the last.
What they now want to know is whether there's a limit and if so, where? ``It concerns how the world was made,'' team leader Peter Armbruster said Friday.
What does the discovery mean to the average person? For now, a new addition to the periodic table in textbooks around the world. Element 110 has an atomic weight of 269 - the heaviest ever produced.
Most matter is found in mixtures but elements are substances that cannot be separated into other substances by ordinary chemical or physical means. Alchemists, for example, could transmute many things, but never succeeded in turning base metals, copper and lead, into more precious elements of silver and gold.
Scientists believed the element 110 could exist. But they had to create the ideal conditions for its birth and a means of detecting its short life. For 10 years, researchers around the world raced to do just that. Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, working with Russian colleagues at a research center in Dubna, Russia, started before the Darmstadt team, but were using a different technique.
``That's why we are sending in our paper so rapidly, because we could expect the same announcement any day from the other group,'' Armbruster, a German, said in a phone interview.
The team, which dashed off an article Nov. 14 describing the work, said it first detected the element on Nov. 9 at 4:39 p.m. It went public with the find late Thursday after producing four more atoms.
Each time, the element disappeared in less than a thousandth of a second. But scientists knew it was there because they detected a helium nucleus it emitted as it decayed.
Armbruster said the center - credited with the discovery of elements 107, 108 and 109 early last decade - will try next week to make a heavier version - an isotope - that will have a longer life.
Figuring out how many elements can exist has been an eternal goal of science, shedding light on how the universe evolved and the structure of atoms. Elements are characterized by the number of positively charged particles, protons, that are in their nucleus. by CNB