Monday, February 18, 2019

Element of the Month!: Dubnium

February's Element of the Month:


Atomic Mass: 268ish amu
Melting Point: well, you know, it's really hard to...
Boiling Point: yeah, see, there again, you can't really...

Dubnium! Dubnium. Rub-a-dub-Dubnium. It is a totally fakey Element. I mean, Element #94, Plutonium, is by convention the highest-numbered Element that occurs in nature, although we've let a surprising amount of Element #95, Americium, go feral. Then there's Curium, Berkelium, Californium, Einsteinium, and then #100 Fermium, thought to be the highest-numbered Element that could occur in nature in certain extremely, extremely, extremely unusual circumstances. Then there's Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium, Rutherfordium, and then, finally, the Element of the Month, #115 Dubnium.

It doesn't exist in any meaningful way. The brainiest physics guys in all the lands can only, even at the very highest levels of funding, produce a dozen atoms at a time, and the half-life of Dubnium isotopes peaks at about one day. That means that most of the time, there's no such thing as Dubnium.

At this point, it is tempting to marvel at modern physics, but I'll caution you that Dubnium was first concocted at the Dubna research facility in a land called "the Soviet Union," and that it happened before I was born, and that I am not a spring chicken by any reasonable measure.

The most interesting thing about Dubnium is the controversy around how it was named, and even that is not very interesting.

The Centerfold!

Since Elemental Dubnium is not a thing that can be photographed, we turn -- as we once did for Hassium -- to
the My Little Pony fan art community.  Dubnium the Pony is "Solitary, Serious, and Grungy" and likes
his music loud.  He's the creation of Skoryx; image used with permission.

Fake Element chemists have been able to run a couple of experiments with Dubnium compounds, and I would imagine that they've been able to learn or at least confirm some significant ideas about atomic structure and behavior that way. Unfortunately, the summaries of these experiments always sound rather less than earth-shaking, along the lines of "gosh, they made three molecules of dubnium bromide!" In the current Wiki article on Dubnium, an earnest discussion of the chemical literature culminates in this spectacularly banal final sentence: "From the available information, it was concluded that dubnium often behaved like niobium, sometimes like protactinium, but rarely like tantalum."

And there you have it, folks.  The few dozen atoms of Dubnium that have ever existed?  They have rarely been like Tantalum.

"Dubnium," by Joyce Nielsen.  I just found a whole periodic table worth of mixed media pieces by
this Denver artist, and they are all pretty great.  Did I mention that my birthday is coming
right up?  Because it will be, eventually.

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