Element 118: The Heaviest Thing Ever Created

Elle
10 hours ago
9 min read

Imagine spending four months firing 2.5 quintillion calcium atoms at a target, using millions of dollars worth of equipment, just to create one single atom of a new element. And then that atom exists for less than a millisecond before disappearing forever.

That's exactly what happened in 2002 when scientists in Russia created oganesson, element 118, the heaviest element ever made. As of 2025, only five atoms have been successfully produced. Five. Total. In over two decades.

And yet, oganesson tells us something profound about the universe. It pushes the boundaries of what's possible. It tests our understanding of physics and chemistry. And it hints at the possibility of an "island of stability" where superheavy elements might actually stick around long enough to study.

This is the story of how we created something that shouldn't exist, why it matters, and what happens when science pushes to the absolute edge of the periodic table.

The Element That Almost Wasn't

Before we talk about oganesson, let's understand what makes an element an element.

Every atom has a nucleus at its center, packed with protons and neutrons. The number of protons determines what element it is. Hydrogen has 1 proton. Carbon has 6. Oxygen has 8. Uranium has 92. The periodic table is basically just a list organized by how many protons each element has.

Oganesson has 118 protons, giving it the highest atomic number and highest atomic mass of all known elements. It sits at the very end of the periodic table, in the noble gas column (think helium, neon, argon). But here's the thing: oganesson probably doesn't act like a noble gas at all.

Noble gases are supposed to be stable, unreactive, and gaseous at room temperature. But oganesson is predicted to be a solid or perhaps a "noble liquid" with a boiling point of 50-110°C, and it should react with fluorine to give stable compounds like OgF2 and OgF4.

So basically, oganesson breaks all the rules we'd expect based on its position on the periodic table. It's too heavy. Too unstable. Too weird.

The Long Road to Discovery

In 1922, Danish physicist Niels Bohr predicted that a seventh noble gas should have atomic number 118 and predicted its electronic structure. That was over a century ago. Scientists knew what they were looking for. They just had no idea how to make it.

It was 107 years from that prediction before oganesson was successfully synthesized.

The problem is simple: you can't just find superheavy elements lying around. They don't exist in nature. They're too unstable. Even if they formed somehow, they'd decay almost instantly. To study them, you have to create them yourself. And creating new elements is insanely difficult.

The False Start

In 1999, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced they'd discovered elements 118 and 116 by accelerating krypton-86 ions and directing them at lead-208 targets, claiming to have created three atoms after 11 days of work.

It was huge news. A major discovery. The lab celebrated.

Then, in 2001, they retracted the claim. It was discovered that some of the data had been falsified. One of the biggest embarrassments in modern physics.

The race to create element 118 was back to square one.

The Real Discovery

In 2002, a research group from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, together with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, began bombarding californium-249 with calcium-48 ions.

Here's what makes this so challenging: Calcium-48 has a natural abundance of only 0.19%, making it very rare and correspondingly costly at USD 200,000 per gram. But it's perfect for creating superheavy elements because it's unusually neutron-rich for a light element.

The 2002 experiment took four months and involved a beam of 2.5 × 10^19 calcium ions (that's 25 quintillion) to produce a single event believed to be the synthesis of oganesson-294.

Let that sink in. Four months of constant bombardment. Twenty-five quintillion collisions. One atom created.

They produced one atom in spring 2002 and two more in 2005. That's it. Three atoms total in the first few years. The isotope oganesson-294 is highly radioactive, with a half-life of about 0.7 to 0.89 milliseconds. Less than one thousandth of a second. You can't see it. You can't touch it. You can barely detect it before it's gone.

How Do You Even Know It Worked?

You can't look at oganesson through a microscope. You can't weigh it. You can't do chemistry experiments with it. So how do scientists know they actually created it?

The answer: decay chains.

When oganesson decays, it doesn't just disappear. It transforms into another element by spitting out particles. That element then decays into another element. And another. And another. This creates a decay chain, a sequence of transformations that scientists can detect and measure.

Each element has a unique decay signature. By measuring the energy and timing of the particles released, scientists can work backward and figure out what the original element must have been.

It's like forensic science at the atomic level. You don't see the crime happen, but you can analyze the evidence left behind.

In December 2015, the Joint Working Party of IUPAC and IUPAP recognized oganesson as one of four new elements, officially confirming the discovery.

Naming the Element

In 2016, scientists involved in the discovery of elements 115, 117, and 118 held a conference call to decide their names. Element 118 was the last to be decided upon; after Yuri Oganessian was asked to leave the call, the remaining scientists unanimously decided to name the element "oganesson" after him.

Yuri Oganessian was a pioneer in superheavy element research for sixty years, and his team and proposed techniques had led to discoveries of elements from 107 up to 118.

At the time of naming, oganesson was one of only two elements named after a person living at the time of naming (the other being seaborgium), and currently Yuri Oganessian is the only person still living with an element named after him.

The element was formally named on November 28, 2016.

Imagine that. You work for sixty years pushing the boundaries of nuclear physics, and your colleagues honor you by putting your name at the very end of the periodic table. That's a legacy.

The Island of Stability

Here's where things get really interesting. As of 2020, 18 years after the first successful creation of oganesson, scientists had reported making a total of five atoms of it. Five atoms in nearly two decades.

But scientists aren't just creating superheavy elements for fun. They're searching for something called the "island of stability."

The island of stability is a predicted set of isotopes of superheavy elements that may have considerably longer half-lives than known isotopes of these elements, predicted to center near flerovium isotopes in the vicinity of the predicted closed neutron shell at N = 184.

Here's the idea: as elements get heavier, they generally get less stable. But nuclear physics isn't a smooth progression. There are "magic numbers" of protons and neutrons where nuclei become unexpectedly stable.

Theory suggests that the next magic numbers beyond those known are around 108, 110 or 114 protons, and 184 neutrons, configurations that could lead to special properties allowing atoms to survive much longer than similar species.

In the case of copernicium (element 112), the lifetime increases from less than a thousandth of a second to 30 seconds as more neutrons are added. Thirty seconds might not sound like much, but for superheavy elements, that's practically forever.

Scientists have confirmed experimentally that we've reached the shores of the region of enhanced stability, though there is general agreement that truly stable superheavy nuclei are no longer expected.

So the island of stability exists, but it's not what scientists originally hoped. Instead of elements that might last millions of years, we're looking at elements that might last hours, days, or maybe weeks. Still impressive for something with 118 protons crammed into a tiny nucleus.

Why Does This Matter?

You might be thinking: okay, cool science experiment, but who cares? We made five atoms of something that immediately disappeared. What's the point?

Here's why it matters:

Understanding Fundamental Physics: Creating superheavy elements tests our understanding of nuclear forces, quantum mechanics, and atomic structure. The fact that we can make predictions about elements that don't exist and then actually create them proves our theories work.

Pushing the Limits: The race to create ever heavier elements continues because theorists predict certain combinations of protons and neutrons may land in an island of stability where these elements will stop decaying immediately, potentially with half-lives of a year, 100 days, or 1,000 days. That would be revolutionary.

Weird Chemistry: Oganesson's position on the periodic table puts it in the noble gas group, but the element almost certainly isn't a gas and behaves more like a metalloid or post-transition metal than a noble gas. This tells us that at extreme atomic numbers, the rules of chemistry change in fundamental ways.

Technology of the Future: Who knows what we might be able to do with superheavy elements if we could make them stable enough to study properly? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. We won't know until we try.

Because It's There: Sometimes the best reason to do something is simply because it's possible. Humans created the heaviest element in the universe. That's incredible in its own right.

The Quest Continues

Scientists aren't stopping at element 118. The next elements along the periodic table, 119 and 120, are the lightest elements to have not yet been discovered.

In July 2024, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory successfully forged element 116 (livermorium) using a novel method involving titanium-50, marking a considerable leap forward that provides critical data for future experiments. The next ambitious target for titanium-50 fusion is the creation of element 120, which would be the heaviest element yet made and the first on the eighth row of the periodic table.

Creating element 120 would open an entirely new row of the periodic table. It would be like discovering a new continent on the chart of elements. But it's incredibly difficult. Physicist Hiromitsu Haba, director of the Nuclear Chemistry Group at RIKEN, is currently on the hunt for element 119. Other labs around the world are working on similar projects.

The challenge is immense. You need:

Incredibly rare isotopes (like calcium-48 or titanium-50)
Months or years of constant bombardment
Detection equipment sensitive enough to catch single atom decay events
Massive amounts of funding and patience

And even then, you might create just one or two atoms.

What We've Learned About the Universe

Oganesson teaches us that the periodic table doesn't end neatly. It teaches us that chemistry gets weird at the extremes. It teaches us that nature has limits, but those limits are further out than we thought.

Oganesson was 107 years from prediction to synthesis. That's multiple human lifetimes of work. Multiple generations of scientists building on each other's research.

Presently, the only use for oganesson is research into the element's properties and perhaps work to synthesize new superheavy elements. It has no practical applications. Because it's a synthetic element, oganesson serves no biological role in any organism, and exposure to it would be toxic because of its radioactivity.

But that's okay. Not everything needs a practical purpose. Sometimes knowledge for its own sake is enough.

The Edge of the Possible

Scientists want to know where the periodic table ends: "Everybody knows at some point there will be an end. There will be a heaviest element, ultimately." The table will be finished when we've discovered all elements with isotopes that live at least a hundredth of a trillionth of a second.

That's the goal. To map every possible element, even the ones that can barely exist at all.

Oganesson sits at position 118 on the periodic table. It exists for less than a millisecond. We've made five atoms of it in over twenty years. And yet, it represents one of humanity's greatest achievements.

We looked at the periodic table, saw an empty spot, and said: we can make that. And we did. That's the power of human curiosity. That's what happens when scientists refuse to accept "impossible" as an answer. That's what it means to push to the absolute edge of what nature allows. Element 118 is the heaviest thing we've ever created. It barely exists. But it proves that we can reach the edge of the possible and maybe, just maybe, push a little further.

Sources

Wikipedia - "Oganesson" - Comprehensive historical information, synthesis details, naming, and predictions
Study.com - "Oganesson | Element, Uses & Properties" - Discovery confirmation and synthesis details
Science Notes - "Oganesson Facts - Element 118" - Properties, naming process, and living namesake information
Royal Society of Chemistry - "Oganesson - Element information, properties and uses | Periodic Table" - IUPAC confirmation details
ChemistryViews - "New Kids on the Table: Is Element 118 a Noble Gas? – Part 3" - Synthesis process, calcium-48 cost, and predicted properties
WebElements - "Oganesson » the essentials" - Production timeline and experimental details
WebElements - "Oganesson - historical information" - Berkeley Lab false discovery and retraction
ISOFLEX USA - "Oganesson (Og)" - Yuri Oganessian biography and experimental details
WebElements - "Oganesson - the essentials" - Synthesis statistics and decay properties
Britannica - "Oganesson | Definition & Facts" - Berkeley Lab data falsification
Wikipedia - "Island of stability" - Nuclear physics predictions and magic numbers
Scientific American - "The Quest for Superheavy Elements and the Island of Stability" - Current research and discovery timeline
Scientific American - "New Way of Making Superheavy Elements May Bring 'Island of Stability' within Reach" - July 2024 titanium-50 breakthrough and element 120 goals
Royal Society of Chemistry - "Have we reached the shores of the island of stability?" - Elements 119 and 120 as undiscovered
Phys.org - "Greetings from the island of enhanced stability" - Copernicium lifetime increases and current understanding
Düllmann Group - "Greetings from the island of enhanced stability" - Enhanced stability confirmation
Scientific American - "Superheavy Elements Are Breaking the Periodic Table" - Five atoms produced as of 2020, element 119 research, and periodic table limits
Scientific American - "Superheavy Element 117 Points to Fabled 'Island of Stability' on Periodic Table" - Magic numbers and theoretical predictions
Science News - "Extreme elements push the boundaries of the periodic table" - Island of stability location and neutron-rich isotopes
ScienceDaily - "Greetings from the island of enhanced stability" - Recent research summary