Discovery of bohrium

Bohrium, the element with atomic number 107, was first reported in 1976 by a team led by Yuri Oganessian at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, in the Soviet Union. A group at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Munzenberg, produced it in 1981 by fusing chromium and bismuth nuclei, and their more convincing evidence led to them being credited with the discovery. The name honours the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who developed the model of the atom with electrons in orbits of fixed energy. Bohrium is a synthetic, radioactive element, and its isotopes decay within seconds, so it can be studied only a few atoms at a time. Its chemistry resembles that of rhenium, the element above it in the periodic table.

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