Ununbium is a chemical element that belongs to the transactinide group on the periodic table, making it one of the heaviest elements ever discovered. Because ununbium must be synthesized in a lab before it can be studied, little is known about it. The high cost of synthetic production makes it unlikely that this element will find a commercial application, but scientists are still studying it in the hopes of learning more about it.
This element’s chemical properties aren’t fully understood. Scientists expect the metal to behave like a metal like cadmium or mercury, based on the patterns that govern the periodic table of elements. Ununbium, on the other hand, has behaved more like a noble gas in experiments, leaving scientists unsure whether the element is a gas or a metal. It is definitely radioactive, as are other transactinides, and it is also unstable, lasting only a short time before decaying into a more stable element.
The credit for the discovery of this element is still up for debate. The credit appears to go to a Darmstadt, Germany-based research team led by Peter Armbruster and Sigurd Hoffmann. In 1996, the men succeeded in producing an atom of the element by colliding zinc and lead in a linear accelerator, and they repeated the experiment successfully in 2000. In 2004, a group of Japanese researchers confirmed the discovery.
The name of this element is also up for grabs as of 2008. Using a systematic element naming system derived from the atomic weight of each element, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has temporarily decreed “ununbium” as a name; ununbium has an atomic number of 112, and “ununbi” means “one one two” in Latin. For the time being, the element is designated by the symbol Uub on the periodic table; the IUPAC may take a decade or more to decide who gets credit for discovery and who gets the honor of proposing a name.
Researchers hope to learn more about the periodic table’s structure and the sciences by studying super heavy elements like ununbium. The short half-life and radioactivity of these elements limit such research; these characteristics make them difficult to study.