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Physics

We could discover a new element on the periodic table in 2025

Work is under way to produce the first atom of element 120 ever seen on Earth, and the results could be in surprisingly soon

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

23 December 2024

Jacklyn Gates (Staff Scientist, Heavy Element Group) at the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator, BGS, in Building 88 on Monday, July 8, 2024 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. Experts in the Nuclear Science Division use the 88-Inch Cyclotron to test a new way to make superheavy element 116, livermorium.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory aims to make heavier elements by firing titanium particles at a metal target

Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab

The race to discover new chemical elements will heat up in 2025, resulting in the heaviest one so far and a new row added to the periodic table if successful.

“Patience will be the biggest challenge,” says Jacklyn Gates at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California.

Gates and her colleagues are one of a number of teams attempting to produce element 120, also currently known as unbinilium. Attempts to forge such synthetic substances, which don’t exist naturally on Earth,…

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