New Atomic Element Discovered

Fox news is reporting the discovery of a new stable element to be added to the Periodic Table. Currently this element is being referred to as "Ununbibium" or "one-two-two-bium and has an Atomic Number of 122 which means that it has 122 protons. This discovery is groundbreaking in that it has long been understood that Uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring and stable element with an Atomic Number of 92. An element's Atomic Number is also its number on the Periodic Table. Utilizing advanced atom smashing/colliding technology, scientists have long been able to produce extremely short lived and unstable heavy elements of various proton and neutron counts. However, the late Nobel Prize winning scientist Glenn Theodore Seaborg, who died in 1999, first postulated that there should be a naturally stable "Island of Stability" far beyond the known elements where new elements would contain "happy" amounts of protons and neutrons that would allow them to stay as stable as any other known element.

Thus far, artificially produced elements with extremely short life spans fall, in proton and neutron counts, somewhere between the known elements and the fabled "Island of Stability". Scientists have theorized that this island would be reached by the progressive and repetitive study of smashing atoms of various elements, with specifically selected Atomic Numbers, together in hopes of producing new elements of predicted proton and neutron counts far beyond that of Uranium. Though it has been possible to come close to producing the necessary combinations, no one has ever been able to achieve the exact.

Now, an international team of researchers led by Amnon Marinov of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem believes it has discovered that this island already exists in nature without the need of man'r production. What they did to make the discovery was to take large quantities of Thorium, 90 on the Periodic Table, and project each nucleus [the core of an atom containing protons and neurons or just one proton in the case of Hydrogen] through a mass spectrometer able to calculate the weight and elemental makeup of the nuclei. Two isotopes

Resources:
1. Fox News - http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352980,00.html
2. Nobelprize.org - http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1951/seaborg-bio.html