The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) confirmed of the discovery of four new elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 on Dec 30.

These new discoveries are “artificial elements,” meaning that they do not occur naturally and quickly decay into more stable elements.

“These [elements] come from particle physics experiments when they smash two elements,” chemistry teacher Dr. Mala Raghavan said. “It’s really fascinating to see if these elements even can be formed.”

Artificial elements like Lawrencium, Flerovium and the four new elements are very unstable and decompose into other elements within fractions of a second. Because of the time sensitivity of these elements, they have little practical value and will not impact the school’s chemistry curriculum.

Chemistry teacher Smriti Koodanjeri explained why scientists strive to discover new elements despite their historic instability.

“There’s a belief that at some point we’ll come across a stable element,” Koodanjeri said. “Also, we don’t know what else we might discover while studying these new elements; we might discover something that’s useful elsewhere.”

Element 113 (working name Ununtrium) was discovered at Rikagaku Kenkyūsho (RIKEN), a large Japanese research institution.

Ununtrium is the first element ever to be discovered by a group in Asia. Although Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa claimed to have discovered element 43 (Technetium) in 1909, naming it “Nipponium (Np)” after Japan (Nippōn in Japanese), other researchers were unable to reproduce his work. In reality, he had discovered element 75 (Rhenium) and the abbreviation “Np” was later appropriated for Neptunium.

Element 115 (Ununpentium) and Element 117 (Ununseptium) were discovered in a collaboration between scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.

JINR and LLNL also worked together to discover Element 118 (Ununoctium).

Excepting RIKEN, all three of the discovering institutions have named and discovered artificial elements before. JINR discovered element 116, named Livermorium in Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s honor; the JINR discovered element 114, named Flerovium after its Flerov Laboratory, which itself is named after Russian physicist Gregory Flyorov; and ORNL discovered element 61, or Promethium, named after the bringer of fire in Greek mythology.

These four elements will be officially named by the labs that made the discoveries. Proposed names will be greenlighted by the IUPAC, which states that “elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.”

Students expressed mixed opinions on how these new elements will shape science.

Michael Wang (9) does not believe the scientific community will be greatly impacted by these discoveries.

“These elements were already predicted, so I don’t think the scientific community will be much affected other than the fact that another prediction has come true,” Michael said.

Other students interpreted these discoveries as indicative of humanity’s high scientific achievements.

“I think currently the application is still limited, but the fact that we have the ability to make these discoveries shows that we’ve been progressing and our technology is advanced enough to really start exploring our world in a more calculated manner,” David Zhu (11) said.

Although this progress is exciting, scientists strive to make more discoveries in the future.