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If so, it could form a periodic table, much like our own, that atlas of all known matter that includes everything from hydrogen to oganesson.

And on the ground floor, Oganesson blinks out, Half her life gone in less than a millisecond, Happy to be in a poem—or in anything at all really.

Oganesson sits at the bottom of the column with the noble gases, but a paper from 2017 suggests that it may not belong there: the velocities of its supercharged electrons likely approach the speed of light, and so the element may not act like the gases with which it’s grouped.

Instead, oganesson and its neighbors might follow the rules of relativity; time and space might appear to bend inside them, and their properties could follow suit.

Scerri doesn’t believe the periodic table is seriously threatened by elements like oganesson; he points out that some of the electrons in gold atoms spin at velocities that approach light speed, too.