Scientists Have Discovered the Heaviest Metal EVER!

Ladies and gentlemen, press “pause” on that Portal album, because the record has been broken: scientists have discovered the heaviest metal in existence in the known universe.

Gizmodo reports that four atoms of the 117th element, temporarily named ununseptium (Latin for “one one seven”) until reviewed by the scientific community at large, were synthesized at an accelerator laboratory located in Darmstadt, Germany. That was no small feat, explains Gizmodo:

Superheavy elements, those beyond atomic number 104 on the periodic table, aren’t observed in nature. They can only be created by blasting two different types of nuclei at each other in a particle accelerator, and hoping that a few of them fuse together. In the case of ununseptium, that meant aiming a beam of calcium 48 ions at a chunk of berkelium 249.

Unfortunately those four precious atoms decayed into other elements within milliseconds; perhaps once ununseptium passes through rigorous review and is officially added to the periodic table they should call it Grindcorium.

Thanks: Rueben P.