Ununpentium

Ununpentium is the temporary name of an unconfirmed synthetic superheavy element in the periodic table that has the temporary symbol Uup and has the atomic number 115.

Table of contents

1 History
2 Ununpentium in popular culture
3 External link

History

On February 1, 2004, the synthesis of ununpentium and ununtrium were reported in Physical Review C by a team composed of Russian scientists at Dubna University's [1] Joint Institute for Nuclear Research [1], and American scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . Their discovery of the element still awaits confirmation. [1]

The team reported that they bombarded americium (element 95) with calcium (element 20) to produce four atoms of ununpentium (element 115). These atoms, they report, decayed to ununtrium (element 113) in a fraction of a second. The ununtrium produced then existed for 1.2 seconds before decaying into known elements.

Ununpentium is a temporary IUPAC systematic element name. There is an ongoing element naming controversy over what this element should be called.

Ununpentium in popular culture

Ununpentium was theorized to be inside the island of stability. This probably explains why it was mentioned regularly in popular culture before it was actually created:

Ununpentium made entry into the world of UFO conspiracy theory culture when during the 1980s and 1990s Bob Lazar asserted it functioned as "fuel" for UFOss.
As a reference to this kind of UFO conspiracy theory, in the X-COM game series there is an element called elerium-115 or just elerium ("elerium-115" probably being an error as in this form the number would have referred to the atomic mass instead of the atomic number, meaning that elerium would have no neutrons, which is highly implausible).
A fictional stable isotope of ununpentium occurs in the game Dark Reign.
A fictional stable isotope of ununpentium occurs in the movie The Core.