Darmstadtium team proposed the name "becquerelium" after Henri Becquerel. The American team in 1997 proposed the name "hahnium" after Otto Hahn (previously this name had been used for element 105). The name "darmstadtium" (Ds) was suggested by the GSI team in honor of the city of Darmstadt, where the element was discovered. The GSI team originally also considered naming the element "wixhausium", after the suburb of Darmstadt known as Wixhausen where the element was discovered, but eventually decided on "darmstadtium". The new name was officially recommended by IUPAC on August 16, 2003. Darmstadtium has no stable or naturally occurring isotopes. Several
Otto Hahn Otto Robert Frisch. Further refinements of the technique, leading to the decisive experiment on 16–17 December 1938 (the celebrated "radium-barium-mesothorium-fractionation"), produced puzzling results: the three isotopes consistently behaved not as radium, but as barium. Hahn, who did not inform the physicists in his Institute, described the results exclusively in a letter to Meitner on 19 December: we are more and more coming to the awful conclusion that our Ra isotopes behave not like Ra, but like Ba. ... Perhaps you can suggest some fantastic explanation. We ourselves realize that it can't really burst into Ba. In her reply, Meitner concurred