October 14, 2014

Horse 1774 - I Wanna Know About Ununennium (119)

Back in Horse 1684 I asked what chemical elements 117 and 118 should be Called. In this post, allow me to speculate messily about the place and ask questions about something which I know very little about indeed.

Chemical element 119 which is either currently known as eka-Francium or more correctly Ununennium does not yet exist. It lies pretty close to what is predicted to be in a so-called island of stability, where the predicted number of protons and neutrons which inhabit the nucleus produce something which has far longer half lives than lighter elements. Many transuranium elements such as Livermorium (116) have half-lives measured ony in milliseconds and this island of stability it is hoped, will produce bigger elements that least hang around long enough to attempt to study.
Just assuming for a second (or possibly shorter depending on the half-life), what happens in a world where things don't spontaneously fall to bits? I wonder about the working chemistry of very big things. Does it work the same way?

Presumably, Ununennium has an electron configuration of 2, 8, 18, 32, 32, 18, 8, 1, and that outermost electron because it is so very very far away from the nucleus, would make it very easy to give up in a chemical reaction. A +1 oxidation state like all the other alkali metals (group 1) would make it quite acquiescent to form salts with halogens for instance.

I don't know if chemicals like UueF or UueCl (Ununennium Floride, Ununennium Chloride) which presumably would display ionic bonding, because the Ununennium is so massive (maybe more than 160 pm in radius) would also be polar because of so many electrons hanging about the Ununennium nucleus.
Would it also be valid for Ununennium Nitrate (UueNO3)?

Richard Feynman using the relativistic Dirac equation and the Bohr model suggests that at anything beyond element 137 (Untriseptium - Uts) that electrons would have to exceed the speed of light. Mind you, John Wheeler's one-electron universe guess, which suggested that one electron skips through time and space kind of bends the rules somewhat.
If you were to drop down Group one of the periodic table to element 165 (Unhexpentium - Uhp) could you also get supermassive salts like UhpF, UhpCl or UhpNO3? Could you have something weird like Ununennium Peroxide (Uue2O2)?

From what I've seen of the existing Group 1 metals (Lithium, Sodium, Potassium etc) they're all pretty reactive and also quite malleable. Superman might have been able to bend steel in his bare hands but even I could bend a bar of Sodium in mine. I bet that you could (if you were somehow able to make a nice big chunk of the stuff), slice a piece of Ununennium in two wit' bread knife.

Please leave some comments, I wanna know stuff. I'm sure that if you send me something about Ununennium, you're bound to get a reaction.

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