The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has approved the names and symbols of the four new elements that remained unnamed and without own symbols since they were officially introduced to the masses in January 2016.
The names for the elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 henceforth will be: Nihonium (Nh), Moscovium (Mc), Tennessine (Ts), and Oganesson (Og), respectively.
IUPAC’s announcement came following the five-month public review period of the element names, originally proposed by their respective discoverers.
“Overall, it was a real pleasure to realize that so many people are interested in the naming of the new elements, including high school students, making essays about possible names and telling how proud they were to have been able to participate in the discussions,” Jan Reedijk, president of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of the IUPAC, said in a statement, CBS News reports.
“It is a long process from initial discovery to the final naming, and IUPAC is thankful for the cooperation of everyone involved. For now, we can all cherish our periodic table completed down to the seventh row.”
All four of the new “superheavy” elements are not found in nature, meaning they were created artificially in laboratories by bombarding beams of heavy nuclei at other nuclei inside particle accelerators.
With the addition of these new elements, the seventh row of the periodic table is now complete.
After revealing the proposed names earlier in June, IUPAC started accepting the public opinion on them — a process that lasted five months. According to a forthcoming paper in Pure & Applied Chemistry about the names and symbols of the new elements, several chemists raised questions over the proposed symbol for tennessine (Ts) citing that it could lead to confusion with the abbreviation for the tosyl group (p-toluenesulfonic acid).
Worth noting, the names of each of the four new elements were drawn from a scientist’s name or geographic location.