The heaviest element is called Copernicum

On February 24, 2010, IUPAC officially informed the world: the heaviest element was officially named Copernicum, the name of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

The heaviest element was officially named Copernicum, the name of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

Copernicum has an atomic number of 112, which is also the number of protons in the atomic nucleus. It is 277 times heavier, the heaviest of the elements recognized by the International Union of Applied and Pure Chemistry to now incorporate textbooks and scientific studies.

Traditionally, the names of new elements are based on the proposals of those who invented it. This element was led by a group of scientists at GSI Helmholezzẻntum fur Schwerionenforschung (Germany), headed by Prof. Sigurd Hofmann to celebrate Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). IUPAC has chosen the birth of this famous astronomer (19-2) to make a recognition decision. Copernicus' work in astronomy is heliocentricism, asserting that the sun is the center of the solar system, orbiting it as the earth and other planets.

In the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, the team proposed that Copernicum be denoted by Cp, but found that the abbreviation for a long time in science has been popularly used to indicate the heat rate of a substance, so IUPAC suggested change and the group has accepted the symbol of the new element Cn. There have been many instances of newly invented elements named for famous scientists.

Hofmann and his team first created Copernicum on February 9, 1996 by using a 100-meter GSI accelerator to bombard zinc ions and target a lead plate. The nuclear combination of the two elements created a new element with a sequence number of 112. But this element only survived for a fraction of a second.

After that, other independent experiments confirmed the invention of the new element. Last year, IUPAC officially acknowledged the existence of element 112 and asked the inventor to propose a name for his 'child' and now IUPAC has approved it.