Discovery of moscovium

Moscovium was first produced in 2003 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in a collaboration between Russian and American scientists, including a team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They bombarded a target of americium-243 with calcium-48 nuclei and observed the decay chains of a few atoms of the new element with atomic number 115. The discovery was confirmed by later experiments, including one at the GSI laboratory in Germany in 2013, and it was officially recognised in 2015. The element was named moscovium in 2016, after the Moscow region where Dubna lies. It is a synthetic, intensely radioactive element, whose isotopes last for less than a second, and it exists only in the laboratory.

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