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Until recently, only a handful of scientists had ever seen einsteinium – the 99th element in the Periodic Table of Elements. Named after Albert Einstein (who had nothing to do with its discovery or research), this rare, synthetic metal is a true oddity. It behaves very differently than its neighbors, a group of metals known as actinides that comprise a separate section of the table. Einsteinium is very difficult to make and possesses an incredibly short lifespan.
This month, in a paper published in the journal Nature, chemists described their first sample of einsteinium. It was a tiny fraction of a gram. But it was big enough for chemists to start to learn about the chemical properties of this element, which has the longest atomic bond length in the actinide family.
The researchers analyzed a piece of einsteinium produced at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a desired byproduct of a reaction that mostly makes californium, which is easier to work with. The team also studied a larger sample of californium that was created at the same time.
This helped the chemists figure out how many neutrons are in einsteinium. Neutrons are positively charged particles that reside in the nucleus of an atom, and they help determine the element’s chemical behavior. The number of neutrons in an atom is equal to its atomic number, which is called the proton number. Different mass versions of the same atom have the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons, and these are called isotopes.