Discovery of meitnerium

Meitnerium was first made in 1982 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, where a team led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Munzenberg detected a single atom of the new element. They had bombarded a target of bismuth with accelerated iron nuclei. Further experiments confirmed the discovery. The element, which has atomic number 109, was named after Lise Meitner, the Austrian-born physicist who, together with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, gave the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission in 1939. Her colleague Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize for the discovery, but she did not. Meitnerium is highly radioactive and its isotopes last only fractions of a second to seconds, so little is known of its properties.

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