Four new chemical elements now have official names and symbols, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced this week.

After a five-month review, IUPAC chemists have approved the four names for superheavy elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 proposed by the elements' discoverers. Such superheavy elements, whose atomic numbers indicate how many protons reside in each nucleus, don't occur naturally in nature, so they must be created in labs.

Following tradition, the names needed to honor a place, geographic region or scientist, with the name endings following specific protocols related to each element's placement on the periodic table of elements.

Here are the new names:

Element 113: nihonium (Nh)

Element 115: moscovium (Mc)

Element 117: tennessine (Ts)

Element 118: oganesson (Og)

The IUPAC announced in January that the four elements would land on the periodic table, though the elements remained nameless. Then, in June, the IUPAC announced the new names, which had yet to be finalized. [Elementary, My Dear: 8 Elements You've Never Heard Of]

The five-month window was meant to give the public a chance to make suggestions or raise concerns about the element names, considering these names will be used around the world, in many languages, Cleveland Evans, a professor of psychology who studies names and naming at Bellevue University in Nebraska and chairs the Name of the Year committee for the American Name Society, told Live Science in June.

The proposed names seem to have sailed through unscathed, though that doesn't mean interest was lacking.

"Overall, it was a real pleasure to realize that so many people are interested in the naming of the new elements, including high-school students, making essays about possible names and telling how proud they were to have been able to participate in the discussions," Jan Reedijk, president of the IUPAC's Inorganic Chemistry Division, said in a statement. "It is a long process from initial discovery to the final naming, and IUPAC is thankful for the cooperation of everyone involved. For now, we can all cherish our periodic table completed down to the seventh row."

Scientists with Japan's RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science proposed the element name nihonium, which is one way to say "Japan" in Japanese and means "the land of the rising sun," according to the IUPAC. Kosuke Morita and his colleagues created the elusive element on Aug. 12, 2012, after colliding zinc nuclei together in a thin layer of bismuth.

Like other superheavy elements, after 113 was created, it quickly decayed, ultimately turning element 113 into 111, and then 109, 107, 105, 103 and finally into element 101, according to Morita.

Names for elements 115 and 117 were proposed by their discoverers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in Tennessee; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Both element names, moscovium and tennessine, honor regions where experiments linked to creating the elements took place.

The name oganesson, for element 118, honors Yuri Oganessian "for his pioneering contributions to transactinide elements research," IUPAC officials said, referring to elements with atomic numbers 104 through 120. "His many achievements include the discovery of super-heavy elements and significant advances in the nuclear physics of super-heavy nuclei, including experimental evidence for the 'island of stability,'" an idea suggesting that super-heavy elements can become stable at some point in their existence.

Though there is no certain limit for the number of protons that can be stuffed into an atomic nucleus, the higher the number, the more unstable the element, chemists say. Now that the seventh row (called a period) of the periodic table has been completed with element 118, according to the IUPAC, chemists will continue to search for heavier elements beyond that.

Original article on Live Science.</s>The periodic table just got some new members, as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has officially accepted new names for four elements. Element numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will no longer be known by their placeholder names, and instead have all-new monikers decided upon by their discoverers.

The discoveries were first recognized about a year ago, and the proposed names for them were decided upon this past June. Now, chemistry’s highest group has decided they are valid and will move forward with the all-new labels.

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Nihonium (Nh), is element 113, and is named for the Japanese word for Japan, which is Nihon.

Moscovium (Mc), element 115, is named for Moscow.

Tennessine (Tn), element 117, is named for Tennessee.

Oganesson (Og), element 118, is named after Yuri Oganessian, honoring the 83-year-old physicist whose team is credited with being the top element hunters in the field.

The official names will take the spot of placeholder titles that were given to the elemental numbers prior to their formal discovery. Those names — ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium — occupied the seventh row of the periodic table, and will now be discarded.

“The names of the new elements reflect the realities of our present time,” IUPAC President Prof Natalia Tarasova says via press release. “Universality of science, honoring places from three continents, where the elements have been discovered — Japan, Russia, the United States — and the pivotal role of human capital in the development of science, honoring an outstanding scientist — Professor Yuri Oganessian”.

With row seven now completed, chemists look to the road ahead, and hope to discover entirely new elements, keeping science on its toes and periodic table poster printers in business.</s>The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), has officially approved the names of four new elements to be added to the periodic table. The new elements, Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson, are now officially part of the periodic table, in spots 113, 115, 117, and 118, respectively.

Back in January the IUPAC, which handles the naming of new elements, officially confirmed that the four new elements had been found. In June, the organization put these four names to a vote. Now those names have been accepted and are going on the periodic table.

Three of the elements, Nihonium, Moscovium, and Tennessine, were named after the places the were discovered, namely Japan (Nihon), Moscow, and Tennessee. The fourth, Oganesson, was named after Russian nuclear scientist Yuri Oganessian.

With the addition of these four elements, the seventh row of the periodic table has finally been completed. Any new elements discovered in the future will require an additional row.

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• 5 of the Oddest Ways to Start a Fire</s>The scientists who discovered the four new elements added to the periodic table also proposed their names, which on Wednesday were approved and officially entered on the list.

Chemistry’s highest gatekeepers have accepted the newly proposed names for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118.

Please welcome to the periodic table: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson.

Scientists first synthesized the new elements between 2002 and 2010, but it wasn’t until last December that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially recognized the discoveries. In June, the scientists who discovered the superheavy, highly reactive elements sent IUPAC their suggested names.

After a five-month waiting period when members of the public could ask questions about the new elements, the four were approved Wednesday, formally filling their boxes in chemistry’s most fundamental table.

The four elements and where their names come from:
• Japanese researchers proposed nihonium, symbol Nh, for element 113, after the Japanese word Nihon, which means Japan.
• A team consisting of scientists from Russia and the United States named element 115, symbol Ms, after Moscow, and element 117, symbol Ts, after Tennessee.
• The Russian team that discovered it named element 118 oganesson, symbol Og, for Yuri Oganessian, a prolific element hunter.</s>Luckily, that principle doesn't apply to elements of the periodic table.

'Nihonium (Nh),' Moscovium (Mc), Oganesson (Og) and Tennessine (Ts) are four elements that were officially name-approved and joined 118 other elements on the periodic table Wednesday. With the latest additions, the periodic table is now complete down to the seventh row.

What makes Nihonium (Nh) -- named after the country Japan (nihon) -- stand out is, maybe not it's super-creative name, but rather the fact that it's the first element to be discovered by a researcher from Asia.

Kosuke Morita, the father of 'nihonium' and a physics professor at Kyushu University said his team's addition to the periodic table was exciting and symbolic.

"All the elements before were discovered in the West, and it is wonderful that we now have an element discovered in Asia," said Morita in a statement. Nihonium is an extremely radioactive, superheavy, synthetically-made element that Morita's research group has been working on since 2003. The group synthesized element 113 for the first time in July 2004, repeating the feat in April 2005 and August 2012. They used RIKEN University's heavy ion linear accelerator -- a particle accelerator that increases the kinetic energy of charged ions to produce reactions. In December 2015, Kosuke Morita submitted his team's proposed name for element 113 to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. It was officially approved after undergoing a public review between June to November 2016. Next up, Morita wants to focus on discovering even heavier elements that might make it onto the periodic table.</s>Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.

The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.

The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.

IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.

The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan.

Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, said his team now planned to “look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond.”

Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.

The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.

“The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row,” said Professor Jan Reedijk, president of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC.

“IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).”

New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.

The four new elements, all of which are synthetic, were discovered by slamming lighter ­nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements.



Like other superheavy elements that populate the end of the periodic table, they only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements.
• This article was amended on 4 January 2016. The reference to the new elements being “manmade” was changed to “synthetic” to follow Guardian style guidance on the use of gender-neutral terms.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announces official names for recently-discovered superheavy elements Nihonium (113), Moscovium (115), Tennessine (117), and Oganesson (118).