Element 108 – Hassium

The element 108, known as hassium, does not occur in nature and must be created in a particle accelerator. It was invented in 1984 and produced by firing magnesium atoms at curium atoms. Hassium atoms are formed by collisions between these atoms. Hassium is found in the same vertical column as iron, ruthenium and osmium in the periodic table. Therefore, this means that it should have chemical characteristics comparable to these metals. However, testing this prediction is difficult.  Only a few hassium atoms can be produced at a time and they only survive approximately 9 seconds.  Imagine having to complete your next laboratory experiment in just 9 seconds!

Hassium was formerly known as “element 108,” “eka-osmium,” or “unniloctium” before its formal discovery. Hassium was the subject of a naming dispute. They all wanted to be officially credited with finding element 108. The GSI team was acknowledged by the IUPAC/IUPAP Transfermium Working Group (TWG) in 1992. It was established that their study was more comprehensive. The name hassium was offered by Peter Armbruster and his colleagues, derived from the Latin Hassias, which means Hess or Hesse, the German state where this element was originally discovered. An IUPAC committee proposed that the element’s name be changed to hahnium (Hn) in honour of German scientist Otto Hahn in 1994. Despite the fact that the finding team has the right to offer a name, this was not the case. The German discoverers and the American Chemical Society (ACS) objected to the name change. But, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) eventually approved the name hassium (Hs) in 1997.

Amazingly, a group of chemists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, the Paul Scherrer Group, were able to solve the problem. Experiments on the chemical behavior of hassium were conducted at the Institute and the University of Bern in Switzerland. They discovered, for example, that hassium atoms react with oxygen to create a hassium oxide molecule of the sort predicted by its periodic table position. Other characteristics of hassium have been measured by scientists. That included the energy released as it undergoes nuclear decay to another atom.

Only a few hundred atoms of this element have been created. So, it isn’t much experimental data on it. The behaviour of other elements in the same element group is used to anticipate properties. At room temperature, hassium is predicted to be a metallic silver or grey metal, similar to osmium.