{"id":96919,"date":"2019-10-02T02:24:54","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T09:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/atom-by-atom-experiments-at-the-edge-of-the-periodic-table"},"modified":"2019-10-02T02:24:54","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T09:24:54","slug":"atom-by-atom-experiments-at-the-edge-of-the-periodic-table","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/atom-by-atom-experiments-at-the-edge-of-the-periodic-table","title":{"rendered":"Atom-by-atom experiments at the edge of the periodic table"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/atom-by-atom-experiments-at-the-edge-of-the-periodic-table.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Investigating the heaviest elements known is rewriting our knowledge of chemistry and may even mean the end of the periodic table itself, writes Kit Chapman.<\/p>\n<p>In 2018, Peter Schwerdtfeger published a paper that turned chemistry on its head. According to calculations he and his colleagues performed, oganesson \u2013 element 118, the heaviest known \u2013 was not a noble gas as you would expect from its position in the periodic table, but a highly reactive solid. Even stranger, it didn\u2019t seem to have electron shells.<sup>1<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>\u2018Well, that statement is oversimplified,\u2019 says Schwerdtfeger, a theoretical chemist at Massey University in New Zealand. \u2018You can still build up the electron densities from orbitals describing individual shells. What happens is that for oganesson the shell structure is barely visible, approaching an electron gas.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Investigating the heaviest elements known is rewriting our knowledge of chemistry and may even mean the end of the periodic table itself, writes Kit Chapman. In 2018, Peter Schwerdtfeger published a paper that turned chemistry on its head. According to calculations he and his colleagues performed, oganesson \u2013 element 118, the heaviest known \u2013 was [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}