Discovery of hassium

Hassium was first synthesised in 1984 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, by a team led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Munzenberg. They fired accelerated iron nuclei at a target of lead, and fusion of the nuclei produced a few atoms of the new element, which were identified by their characteristic radioactive decay. The element was named after Hassia, the Latin name of the German state of Hesse, in which Darmstadt lies, and the name was officially adopted in 1997. Hassium is a synthetic, radioactive element, with atomic number 108, and its isotopes survive for seconds at most. Experiments on only a handful of atoms have shown that it behaves chemically like its lighter relative osmium, as the periodic table predicts.

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