The periodic table’s most recent official update came in 2016, when IUPAC formally named four new elements: nihonium (113), moscovium (115), tennessine (117), and oganesson (118). Those additions completed period 7, giving the table 118 confirmed elements. No element beyond 118 has been synthesized and confirmed since then, making the current table a finished row with an empty row 8 waiting below it. That empty row is not just a gap on a poster; it represents one of the most ambitious frontiers in modern physics, with laboratories on three continents racing to create element 119 and push into entirely uncharted nuclear and chemical territory.
What Completing Period 7 Actually Meant
Filling in elements 113 through 118 was not like discovering something hiding in plain sight. Each of these elements was synthesized in particle accelerators by smashing lighter nuclei together at enormous energies, and each existed for only fractions of a second before decaying. Oganesson, element 118, sits in the position traditionally occupied by noble gases like helium and neon. But researchers have predicted that oganesson behaves nothing like its lighter relatives. Calculations show that its electron structure is so distorted by relativistic effects that it resembles a uniform electron gas rather than the neat, shell-like arrangement you see in other noble gases.1PubMed Central. Oganesson: A Noble Gas Element That Is Neither Noble Nor a Gas It likely is not a gas at all under normal conditions and may not be chemically “noble” in the traditional sense. Its very existence at the end of the seventh row underscores a theme that will dominate the rest of this article: the further you push into superheavy territory, the less reliably the periodic table’s familiar patterns hold.
The Hunt for Element 119
Element 119 would be the first element in period 8 and, in principle, the next alkali metal below francium. Every major superheavy-element laboratory in the world has its sights set on it. Japan’s RIKEN Nishina Center built a brand-new superconducting linear accelerator and a dedicated gas-filled recoil ion separator specifically for the task, aiming to create element 119 through a hot-fusion reaction.2PubMed Central. Facility upgrade for superheavy-element research at RIKEN Meanwhile, Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna has commissioned a new cyclotron capable of beam intensities up to ten particle-microamperes, feeding into an upgraded gas-filled recoil separator designed to handle that punishing throughput.3Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. DGFRS-2—A gas-filled recoil separator for the Dubna Super Heavy Element Factory China’s Institute of Modern Physics in Lanzhou is also planning attempts.
The specific recipes being tried give a sense of the practical challenge. RIKEN has so far focused on firing vanadium-51 beams at curium-248 targets, partly because curium is easier to handle from a radiation-safety standpoint and vanadium-51 is cheaper and more available than some alternatives. Other candidate reactions include americium-243 plus chromium-54 and berkelium-249 plus titanium-50.4PubMed Central. How Japan took the lead in the race to discover element 119 Each combination produces a compound nucleus with 119 protons, but the probability of success differs for each, and nobody knows yet which will work. As of mid-2025, no group has announced a confirmed detection of element 119.
Why Making a New Element Is Extraordinarily Difficult
The elements added in 2016 were all made using calcium-48 beams, a projectile that proved spectacularly effective for synthesizing elements 114 through 118. Calcium-48 has a magic number of neutrons that gives it unusual stability, and the reactions it enabled had relatively high success rates, sometimes producing a handful of atoms over months of bombardment. Reaching element 119 and beyond requires heavier projectiles like titanium-50, vanadium-51, or chromium-54, and these reactions are expected to have far smaller cross sections, meaning the probability of a successful fusion event drops dramatically.
Theoretical work has tried to estimate just how much harder it will get. One approach uses the strong correlation between the contact distance of colliding nuclei and the energy above the Coulomb barrier to extrapolate from known calcium-48 reactions to heavier projectiles.5arXiv. Synthesis of the superheavy elements beyond Og: extrapolating from 48Ca to 54Cr The predictions are sobering: expected production rates could be orders of magnitude lower than those for oganesson. Where a lab might have detected a few atoms over several months with calcium-48, the same lab could run for years before seeing a single atom of element 119.
The target materials themselves pose another bottleneck. Actinide targets like curium-248 and berkelium-249 can only be produced by prolonged neutron irradiation in very high flux nuclear reactors, followed by chemical processing in specialized hot-cell facilities that exist in only a handful of places worldwide.6The European Physical Journal A. Actinide targets for the synthesis of superheavy nuclei These materials are scarce, expensive, and radioactive enough to require serious safety infrastructure. The supply chain is, in a real sense, as much of a limiting factor as the physics.
The Island of Stability
If the only payoff were bragging rights for adding one more element to a poster, the enormous expense of this research would be hard to justify. But the real scientific draw lies beyond element 119, in a theorized region called the island of stability. Since the 1960s, nuclear models have predicted that certain combinations of protons and neutrons form closed shells, analogous to the filled electron shells that make noble gases chemically inert. These closed nuclear shells would give certain superheavy nuclei dramatically longer lifetimes than their neighbors. Various models put the magic proton numbers somewhere between 114 and 126, with a magic neutron number around 172 or 184.7Physica Scripta. Nuclear structure features of very heavy and superheavy nuclei—tracing quantum mechanics towards the ‘island of stability’
The elements already synthesized near the lower edge of this region do show hints of enhanced stability. Flerovium (114) and oganesson (118) both have half-lives longer than a simple extrapolation from lighter superheavy elements would suggest. But nobody has yet reached the heart of the island, which would require producing isotopes with far more neutrons than current techniques can deliver. The promise, though, is tantalizing: nuclei on the island could survive long enough to study their chemistry in meaningful detail, rather than blinking in and out of existence in milliseconds.
When Chemistry Stops Following the Rules
Reaching new elements is not just about nuclear physics. Every new superheavy element tests whether the periodic table’s chemical patterns still hold at extreme atomic numbers, and the evidence so far says they increasingly do not. The reason is relativity. As the number of protons in the nucleus grows, the innermost electrons must orbit at speeds approaching the speed of light. This contracts the inner electron shells, which in turn changes how the outer electrons are distributed, and those outer electrons are the ones responsible for chemical behavior.
The effects are not subtle. Oganesson’s predicted electron structure, as noted earlier, looks more like a smeared-out electron gas than a noble gas with distinct shells. Flerovium, element 114, sits below lead in group 14 and was originally expected to behave like a heavier version of lead. Experiments on single flerovium atoms instead showed it to be extremely volatile and the least reactive member of its group, less reactive toward gold surfaces than even the volatile metal mercury, though more reactive than the noble gas radon.8PubMed Central. On the adsorption and reactivity of element 114, flerovium That puts it in a strange chemical no-man’s-land: not quite a metal, not quite a noble gas.
Theoretical predictions for the hypothetical elements 119 and 120, which would nominally be an alkali metal and an alkaline-earth metal, suggest even more dramatic departures. Calculations indicate these elements could display penta- or hexa-valency, meaning they would form bonds using five or six electrons, something completely foreign to the chemistry of lighter alkali and alkaline-earth elements like sodium or calcium. The reason is that relativistic effects activate deep-core electrons for bonding, electrons that in lighter elements are locked away and chemically inert.9ChemRxiv. Periodic Law of Chemistry Overturns for Superheavy Elements The periodic law, the foundational idea that elements in the same column should have similar chemistry, breaks down for these superheavy species.
This breakdown does not mean the periodic table is wrong. It means the table was built on patterns observed in elements where relativistic effects are small, and those patterns are approximations that get worse as you add more protons. The table remains a spectacular organizing tool for the first hundred or so elements, but anyone looking at rows 7 and 8 should understand that column membership no longer guarantees chemical similarity the way it does higher up.
Doing Chemistry One Atom at a Time
One of the stranger aspects of superheavy-element research is that all chemistry must be done on single atoms. You cannot collect a visible sample of flerovium or oganesson; the most anyone has ever made is a few dozen atoms total, and each atom decays within seconds at most. Chemists have devised ingenious gas-phase chromatography techniques where a single atom is carried along a detector surface and its adsorption behavior is measured on the fly, before it disappears. The flerovium experiments that revealed its unexpectedly low reactivity were performed exactly this way.
This creates a fundamental interpretive challenge. In ordinary chemistry, you study the collective behavior of billions of atoms and draw conclusions from averages. With superheavy elements, you observe one atom at a time and piece together a statistical picture from handfuls of events spread across years of experiments. The confidence intervals are wide, and surprising results could reflect genuine new physics or just the noise of tiny sample sizes. Researchers are well aware of this tension, and confirmations from independent laboratories are considered essential before any chemical property is treated as settled.
Could Nature Make Superheavy Elements on Its Own
Every superheavy element on the periodic table was made artificially, in a particle accelerator. But nature has its own nuclear furnace: the rapid neutron-capture process, or r-process, that occurs when neutron stars merge. In these cataclysmic events, seed nuclei are bombarded with neutrons so quickly that they cannot decay between captures, pushing nuclei far into neutron-rich territory before they eventually beta-decay toward stability.
Simulations of neutron-star mergers show that nuclei up to roughly atomic number 110 and mass number 340 can be produced, with a major production peak at the neutron-number-184 shell closure, corresponding to nuclei around mass 280.10Nuclear Physics A. The production of transuranium elements by the r-process nucleosynthesis Above atomic number 110, efficient fission along those isotopic chains chews through the nuclei before they can accumulate. The r-process must necessarily pass through superheavy nuclear territory, meaning these extreme nuclei exist transiently during the event even if they do not survive long enough to be found in nature afterward.11The European Physical Journal A. Nucleosynthesis and observation of the heaviest elements
This connection between astrophysics and the periodic table is not just academic. The nuclear properties of superheavy nuclei, particularly their fission barriers and shell closures, feed directly into the models that predict how much gold, platinum, and uranium a neutron-star merger ejects into space. Getting those properties wrong means getting the cosmic abundances wrong. So the quest to understand elements 119 and beyond has consequences for astrophysics as well as chemistry.
The Hardware Driving the Race
The three main contenders in the element-119 race have all built or upgraded major accelerator facilities in the past decade, and the engineering involved is as remarkable as the physics. At RIKEN in Japan, the new superconducting linear accelerator (SRILAC) replaced the older warm linac to deliver heavier ion beams at higher intensity. RIKEN also constructed GARIS-III, a gas-filled recoil separator purpose-built for hot-fusion reactions, which produce residues with different kinematic properties than the cold-fusion reactions the lab used to discover element 113.12PubMed Central. Facility upgrade for superheavy-element research at RIKEN
In Dubna, Russia, the Super Heavy Element Factory centers on the DC-280 cyclotron, which can deliver beam intensities an order of magnitude higher than its predecessor. The upgraded separator, DGFRS-2, was designed specifically to handle those intense beams while suppressing the flood of unwanted reaction products that threaten to drown out the rare superheavy signals.13Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. DGFRS-2—A gas-filled recoil separator for the Dubna Super Heavy Element Factory In practice, the challenge is like searching for one particular grain of sand being blown through a sandstorm: you need extremely sensitive detectors and extremely effective filters to pick out the signal.
China’s entry into the race adds a third major facility capable of attempting the synthesis. Each of these laboratories brings different strengths: different beam-target combinations, different separator designs, and different detection strategies. In superheavy-element science, independent confirmation from separate labs is what ultimately clinches a discovery, so having three well-equipped competitors is actually ideal for the field, even if the rivalry is fierce.
What Happens to the Table’s Shape
If element 119 is confirmed, it will open period 8, and the table will need a new row. In principle, period 8 could contain up to 50 elements (119 through 168 or beyond), depending on where the nuclear drip line ultimately falls. But the table’s familiar rectangular layout already strains at the edges. The lanthanides and actinides are traditionally printed as separate rows below the main body, a compromise forced by space limitations. Period 8 would likely include a new set of inner-transition elements even more unwieldy to display.
Alternative visualizations have been proposed for decades. Spiral representations, three-dimensional models, and non-rectangular layouts all attempt to capture patterns that the flat grid obscures. Some researchers have argued that a spiral is a more natural graphic representation of periodicity than a rectangle, because it better conveys the continuous increase in atomic number and the way periodicity repeats in expanding cycles. None of these alternatives has come close to displacing the standard table in classrooms and textbooks, but the further the table extends, the more pressure its rectangular format will face.
There is also the deeper question of where the periodic table simply ends. At some point, nuclei become so proton-rich that they cannot hold together for even the nanoseconds needed to qualify as a genuine element. Theoretical estimates place this absolute upper limit somewhere around atomic number 172, though the uncertainties are large. Well before that limit, the chemical concept of an “element” starts to blur: if an atom exists for a trillionth of a second, does it have chemistry in any meaningful sense? These are questions that no laboratory has yet had to answer, but they hover over every discussion of extending the table into period 8 and beyond.
How Naming Works for Elements That Do Not Yet Exist
Before any new element gets a permanent name, it goes through a standardized process overseen by IUPAC and IUPAP. The discovering laboratory must submit evidence of synthesis, and a joint working group evaluates whether the claim meets the criteria for discovery. Only after that evaluation does the discoverer earn the right to propose a name. In the interim, the element is referred to by a systematic placeholder based on its atomic number, using Latin and Greek roots: element 119 is temporarily called “ununennium,” element 120 is “unbinilium,” and so on.
The naming stage has historically been contentious. The disputes over elements 104 through 109 during the Cold War became known informally as the “Transfermium Wars,” with American, Soviet, and German labs each claiming priority. IUPAC eventually developed a more transparent protocol to prevent those drawn-out battles from recurring. For the last batch of elements, the naming went relatively smoothly: nihonium honored Japan, moscovium honored Moscow, tennessine honored Tennessee, and oganesson honored the physicist Yuri Oganessian, one of only two people to have an element named after them while still alive.
Whoever confirms element 119 first will earn the right to name it, and the geopolitics of that naming are already being quietly discussed. A Japanese discovery would mark the second consecutive element discovered in Asia. A Russian or Chinese discovery would carry its own symbolic weight. The name itself must follow IUPAC rules: it can honor a mythological concept, a mineral, a place, a property of the element, or a scientist, and it must end in “-ium” for most elements. The periodic table is, in this sense, as much a cultural document as a scientific one, with each name carrying a story about who made the discovery and what they chose to commemorate.