Scientists Make 1st Measurements Of Highly Radioactive Element Einsteinium indiatimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from indiatimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Einsteinium, Element Named after Albert Einstein, No More a Mystery as Scientists Discover its Properties
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Placed quite down in the periodic table with the atomic number 99, Einsteinium is the seventh transuranic element. Named after world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein, the properties of one of the heaviest elements, einsteinium, have not been understood clearly so far.
But that has now changed as the researchers from California’s Berkeley National Laboratory have come up with solutions to overcome this problem. Led by chemist Rebecca Abergel, the team at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used High Flux Isotope Reactor to first synthesize a 250 nanogram sample of the isotope einsteinium-254. They synthesized it by bombarding neutrons at the curium targets. Thistriggered radioactive decay chains.
Scientists measure properties of elusive Einsteinium, the 99th element in the periodic table
The highly radioactive metal is very challenging to work with.
Illustration by u/di0mmi on Reddit.
Today, Enewetak is a peaceful circular atoll in the Ralik Chain of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. But on the 1st of November, 1952, devastation replaced tranquility after the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the chain of small coral islands.
The test went as planned, with the bomb exploding with a force that was about 500 times more destructive than the Nagasaki blast that suddenly ended the war with the Japanese almost a decade prior. What was surprising was the discovery of a new element in the fallout material that was sent to Berkeley in California for analysis. This new element, known as Einsteinium after physicist Albert Einstein, occupies the 99th position in the periodic table and its properties have always been somewhat elusive until now.
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IMAGE: Berkeley Lab scientists Leticia Arnedo-Sanchez (from left), Katherine Shield, Korey Carter, and Jennifer Wacker had to take precautions against radioactivity as well as coronavirus to conduct experiments with the rare. view more
Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab
Since element 99 - einsteinium - was discovered in 1952 at the Department of Energy s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) from the debris of the first hydrogen bomb, scientists have performed very few experiments with it because it is so hard to create and is exceptionally radioactive. A team of Berkeley Lab chemists has overcome these obstacles to report the first study characterizing some of its properties, opening the door to a better understanding of the remaining transuranic elements of the actinide series.