Ununseptium is a hypothetical chemical element that had yet to be confirmed by 2008, despite plans by several scientific teams to synthesize it. Despite the fact that the existence of this element has yet to be confirmed, the scientific community can draw some conclusions, and it is safe to say that it does exist; if it did not, the entire periodic table would have to be rewritten.
This element belongs to the transactinides family of elements. Transactinides are the heaviest elements ever discovered, and they share a number of chemical properties with ununseptium. Transactinides are all highly unstable, making research difficult, and they are also radioactive. Because these elements exist for such short periods of time, they cannot be found in nature; scientists must synthesize them with the help of a linear accelerator in order to study them.
More stable elements or their isotopes are bombarded with isotopes of other elements to create elements like ununseptium. Heavy elements can emerge from the collisions caused by this bombardment, but only for a short time. Scientists take advantage of these elements’ brief appearance to make as many observations as possible. Given that this technique produces only a few atoms of a transactinide element at a time, the equipment must be extremely precise and expensive.
The placeholder name for this element is “ununseptium,” which refers to its atomic number of 117. Given the discovery of elements 116 and 118, scientists are confident that ununseptium will be discovered at some point; in 2001, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley thought they had discovered ununseptium, but were later forced to retract their claim. Ununseptium could be created by bombarding calcium with berkelium, according to researchers in Dubna, Russia.
“Ununseptium” is a systematic element name that adheres to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s guidelines (IUPAC). Temporary systematic element names are used by the IUPAC to identify elements until their discoveries are confirmed and the IUPAC can determine who deserves credit for discovery and the honor of proposing a name. The suffix “-ium” is used to make the element conform to the rest of the periodic table, and it is derived from the element’s atomic number. Ununsept means “one one seven” in Latin, as you might expect; the temporary symbol for this element is Uus.