Talk:Unbihexium

Possible evidence
There is a link to a pdf from the site linked to at the bottom of the Ubh page, containing some so-called possible evidence for Ubh's existence. However, not having a post-graduate degree of any kind, I can't get much more out of it. sjl 16:30, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

The idea appears to be that certain stones composed of biotite show evidence that a crystal of, say, a Ubh compound sat at their centre and the Ubh decayed, leaving definite signals of its decay energy in the form of a detectable ring (sphere?) of a certain radius - presumably an "average" of where its decay products ended up - from which decay energy can be calculated. The evidence is not conclusive and the article linked to says that other isotopes explain the phenomenon.

Believe me, I would love to see positive evidence of Ubh. We have never studied elements in the periodic table where the g orbitals are being filled. Putting on my best Devil's Advocate hat, I would conjecture the following: 310-Ubh has a half-life that "we would like" but its decay products are so "hot" radioactively that its critical mass is ridiculously small (micrograms or less), because it ejects so many neutrons and odd nuclei in its own decay and the immediate chain below it that even if they fail to smash the rest of the Ubh they cloud the picture. At this level, spotting something that hardly decays in the lifespan of a typical experiment (due to its million-odd-year half-life) is impossible against a noisy background. This way, maybe we can all have what we really want! Meanwhile, I want to hear of spectral lines in supernovae and other high-energy cosmic phenomena matching nothing we know and I would ask for contributions from those observing these events. They might show Ubh, and we may have a fighting chance of duplicating the results on Earth with existing equipment. Spectroscopy can detect very small quantities of material. And, if we can know, we must know!

Looking for a name for something so annoying, "Tantalum" has been taken. "Damoclesium" might be appropriate as a name if it turns up - concentrating Ubh to look for it activates a natural mechanism to destroy it. Dajwilkinson (talk) 01:31, 20 November 2007 (UTC)


 * What happens when neutrons hit infissile uranium? It becomes neptunium or plutonium, which stick around for days, years, or aions. -lysdexia 22:54, 13 April 2008 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.233.202.125 (talk)

239U and 237U have half-lives of days or thereabouts as they decay to the 24,100-year 239Pu and 2-million-year or so 237Np, both fissile nuclei though they more usually alpha-decay. They are long-lived by our standards but not compared to the age of the Earth, hence we do not find them in appreciable quantities in nature. Fermi's point still stands on the matter of such things as Bob Lazar's claim for a really long-lived element 115: if it existed, we would have found it by now. Dajwilkinson (talk) 09:16, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily (yes, I'm aware how old this is). There is currently no known process by which superheavy nuclides like Ubh could be produced in nature: even the r-process should not be able to get this far, because before we get to mass number 300 we encounter a region of nuclides that are unstable enough that neutron capture is likely to lead to fission. So I wouldn't rule out the idea that a really long-lived element 126 is out there on this basis – although I admit that current theoretical predictions of the nuclear landscape in that region find it unlikely. Double sharp (talk) 14:45, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 09:31, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

In fiction
I am unsure why superheavy elements seem to have a missing section on what's been fictionalized about them. Since little is actually done experimentally, it should be fine to include even the outlandish fiction and outright pseudoscientific claims that have been done about these highly exotic elements. 2A02:2F0E:DC17:D900:5CEC:E00F:E7EC:E216 (talk) 10:34, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The question then becomes, what is and isn't worth mentioning; any individual fictional use would run afoul of Wikipedia's policy on due and undue weight. Additionally, plenty of fictional materials can be said to be superheavy elements, but may not have any similarities to the real things, and so such a description would probably be out of place / off-topic. For the same reasons, we also don't describe frictional references to common elements in their articles. The article dedicated to notable occurrences in fiction is List of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and subatomic particles. Complex / Rational  12:29, 15 August 2022 (UTC)