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Element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds.

“Element 117 was obtained in the amount of one atom per week, and element 118 one atom per month. There is no reason to believe that the yield will increase for the still-unknown elements 119 and 120,” he says.

If approved, it will join other newly announced elements: moscovium for element 116, tennessine for element 117 and oganesson for element 118.

The names may disappoint some people, like the 150,000 heavy-metal music fans who signed a petition to get element 115 named “lemmium” after Lemmy Kilmister of the band Motorhead, or the 50,000 Terry Pratchett book lovers who wanted element 117 to be named “octarine,” or New York Times readers who suggested “trumpium” and “godzillium” for the new elements.

Another, with more than 44,000 signatures, wants to name element 117 “octarine” after the late Terry Pratchett and his Discworld book series.