Discovery of oganesson

Oganesson is the heaviest element known, with atomic number 118, and it closes the seventh row of the periodic table. It was produced at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, by a team working with scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, led by Yuri Oganessian. They bombarded californium-249 with calcium-48 nuclei and detected the decay of a few atoms of the new element, with results reported in 2006. A claim made in 1999 by researchers at Berkeley had been withdrawn when it was found that the data had been fabricated. The element was named oganesson in 2016, in honour of Oganessian, only the second element to be named after a person living at the time of the naming. Only a handful of atoms have ever been made.

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