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Welcome darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn), formerly known as Elements 110, 111 and 112, respectively. The names were suggested by the Joint Working Party on the Discovery of Elements, and approved last Friday (November 4) by the General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), according to the Institute of Physics (IOP) in London.
Thethree elements are synthetic substances first manufactured in the 1990s, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Darmstadtium was named after the city near where it was discovery, Darmstadt, Germany. The names roentgenium and copernicium were chosen to honor famed scientists of eras past—German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895 and took home the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his work, and Nicolaus Copernicus, the famed Polish astronomer who theorized that the sun, not the earth, was the center of...
“The naming of these elements has been agreed in consultation with physicists around the world and we’re delighted to see them now being introduced to the Periodic Table,” Robert Kirby-Harris, Chief Executive at IOP and Secretary-General of IUPAP, said on the Institute's News page.
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