Oganesson
Oganesson is the heaviest element on the periodic table confirmed to date, sitting at the bottom of the noble gas group below radon. It's named after Yuri Oganessian, the Russian nuclear physicist who has led much of the world's research into superheavy elements — making oganesson one of only a couple of elements ever named after a scientist who was still living at the time. Only a handful of atoms of oganesson have ever been created, each one decaying in a tiny fraction of a second.
- Group · Period
- 18 · 7
- At room temp
- gas
- Melts at
- Not yet available
- Density
- Not yet available
- Discovered
- 2006
Uses
Oganesson has no practical, industrial or medical use, and given how extraordinarily difficult and rare its production is, none will ever be found. Its entire significance is scientific: it represents the current frontier of the periodic table, and every atom detected helps researchers test the limits of nuclear stability and refine theories about how much further the table of elements might realistically extend.
History
Oganesson was first synthesized by a collaboration between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, who fused calcium nuclei with a californium target using JINR’s heavy-ion accelerator, first reporting success in 2006. It was named oganesson in honor of Yuri Oganessian, a physicist who has played a central role in the discovery of many of the heaviest known elements, with the name formally approved by IUPAC in 2016.
Fun facts
- Oganesson is named after Yuri Oganessian, making him one of the very few scientists in history to have an element named after them while still alive.
- By most accounts, fewer than twenty atoms of oganesson have ever been detected across all experiments conducted worldwide.
- Although it sits in the noble gas group, some theoretical calculations suggest relativistic effects on its electrons could make oganesson behave quite differently from lighter noble gases like neon or argon — possibly far less volatile than a simple extrapolation down the group would suggest.
Frequently asked questions
Does oganesson have any real-world use?
No — oganesson has no commercial, industrial or medical applications. It exists purely as an object of fundamental physics research, produced only a few atoms at a time under exceptionally demanding experimental conditions.
How is oganesson made?
Oganesson is produced by firing an intense beam of calcium nuclei at a target made of californium, another artificial element, over weeks of continuous bombardment. The extraordinarily rare fusion events that result are confirmed by detecting the specific radioactive decay chain each new atom produces.
Is oganesson really a gas at room temperature?
It's conventionally predicted to be, since it sits at the bottom of the noble gas group where every other element is a gas. But this has never been tested — so few atoms have ever existed, and so briefly, that no one has observed its bulk physical state, and some theoretical work even questions whether it would behave like a typical noble gas at all.
Isotopes
1 known isotope
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| Isotope | Natural abundance | Half-life | Decay mode | Mass excess | Binding energy / nucleon | Decay width |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Og-294 | — | 0.58 ms | Alpha decay (100%), Spontaneous fission (20%) | 199,320 keV | 7,079 keV | 7.87 × 10-13 eV |