Is It Possible To Discover NEW Elements?

INTRODUCTION

While we humans have discovered a whole lot of elements and put them into a beautiful chart known as the periodic table, it has been a question of curiosity whether humans can discover any more elements than the 118 we've discovered so far. In this article, I've elaborated some theories regarding the discovery of new elements.

BACKGROUND

Early scientists understood the urge to classify elements. Chemists pondered upon ideas for decades. One such chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, also known as the Father of chemistry, began classifying elements based on their properties. Fast forward to the year 1869, a Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev created a mind blowing visualization for the periodic table. He placed the elements in order of their increasing atomic weight. What's an atomic weight? It's the number of protons plus the number of neutrons in an atom. And elements are the purest substances which contain atoms of the same kind. Mendeleev left gaps for the undiscovered elements and finally in the year 2002, the element 118 Oganesson (Og) was discovered by a Russian chemist Yuri Oganesson, thus making the periodic table complete. A lot of people thought that this was the end of the periodic table and there could be no more elements discovered. The universe was a creation of only these 118 elements. But is it really true? If not, then why haven't we able to discover any new elements?

THEORIES

Richard Feynman, a great scientist also believed that the periodic table had an end. Not with 118, but with 137 elements. Now where did that come from? Feynman, being a great fan of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, said that when an atom had such a dense and heavy nucleus with 137 protons, it would also have 137 electrons as all atoms are stable in the universe, and because of this, there would be a massive amount of electrostatic force between the subatomic particles. This meant that the electrons would have to revolve faster than the speed of light in their orbitals. This would violate Einstein's theory of Special Relativity which says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. What Feynman said made a lot of sense, but scientists later calculated that element 137 can exist and it would only be up to element 173, when things start getting complicated. At that level, electrons would move at very very high speeds.

There are 92 naturally occurring elements on earth. After that, the mass of the atom becomes so much that it decays into smaller atoms. These elements exist for a few milliseconds and then decay. Such a short amount of time period is really less to study and conduct experiments on the atom. As the atomic number increases, the atom gets denser and denser and lives for lesser and lesser time period before it decays into smaller atoms. This means that if further elements are discovered they will survive less than a millisecond.  Element 118 is anyway a noble gas and it filled its octet. But the problem is the next element, element 119, will be so highly unstable that it will be very difficult to obtain. That is why scientists create artificial models for atoms to study them.

OPINION

In my opinion, yes, it is definitely possible to discover new elements because I think the periodic table can be endless. How? We humans are not capable to comprehend the entire universe and we've just seen a glimpse of a speck of the universe up till now. Therefore, there is 100% chance that there exist other undiscovered elements which are hanging around in the universe and we are not even aware of it. Other alien civilizations might even be utilizing such elements for their benefit and use. As for us humans, it hasn't been a long time since we've come here and discovered a whole lot of stuff at such a high rate. So sometime, probably decades later, we surely will discover new elements and open a new era in this exciting world of chemistry.