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Ununpentium

Ununpentium is one of the superheavy elements. Elements heavier than uranium are not generally found in nature. Such superheavy elements are created in the lab by colliding lighter atoms together.

In 2004, a research team of Russian scientists from the Dubna Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) and American scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory successfully synthesized the first atom of ununpentium – element 115. They bombarded calcium (⁴⁸₂₀Ca) and americium ²⁴³₉₅Am ) together in a cyclotron. Calcium is the twentieth element in the periodic table, and americium the ninety-fifth, so they combine to create the hundred and fifteenth element.

Element 115 rapidly decays by emitting an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) which reduces its atomic number by 2 to become ununtrium – element 113. In the experiments at JINR only four atoms of ununpentium were created. They existed for very short amounts of time (between 19 and 280 milliseconds) before decaying. For that reason there are currently no known uses for ununpentium.