Science: Ekarhenium

The standard table of elements lists 92—from hydrogen, the lightest element, to uranium, the heaviest. An atom of hydrogen has one positive charge on the nucleus and one planetary electron; uranium has a positive nuclear charge of 92, and 92 attendant electrons. The existence of all these elements has been well established, except for Nos. 85 and 87 (alabamine and virginium),† whose discovery has been claimed by various investigators but not yet certainly confirmed. The existence of elements heavier than uranium is theoretically possible. In fact, such heavy elements of higher numbers than 92 are supposed to exist in vast quantities in the interiors of stars; and chemical theorists have calculated that those elements must account for 98% of the total matter in the universe.

In 1934 and 1936, Italy’s brilliant Enrico Fermi produced tiny, short-lived quantities of ekarhenium and ekaosmium (Nos. 93 and 94) by bombarding uranium with neutrons. These new substances were entirely synthetic, however, like the many synthetic, artificially radioactive elements which physicists have brought to birth by similar bombardments (TIME, Aug. 17, 1936).

Jean Baptiste Perrin has studied the atom all his long life. Born at Lille during the Franco-Prussian War, he became a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Paris in 1910, became an expert on molecular oscillations and the Brownian movement (movement of visible particles in liquids because of impacts from flying molecules). In 1926 he was awarded a Nobel Prize. Today he is president of the French Academy of Sciences. Last week he announced the discovery of naturally occurring ekarhenium—element No. 93.

What Professor Perrin reported last week was the existence of ekarhenium in pitchblende ore, mother substance of radium. His collaborators used a powerful spectroscope, which splits up radiations from atoms into significant bands and lines. When the pitchblende was analyzed, four faint new lines appeared. Calculation showed that these lines must belong to ekarhenium.

†Named for his adopted State and his native State by Virginia-born Physicist Fred Allison of Alabama Polytechnic Institute.