 Discovery Information
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| Who: Physicists at the Heavy Ion Research Laboratory |
| When: 1982 |
| Where: Darmstadt, West Germany |
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| Name Origin
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| Named after Lise Meitner, a Swedish physicist who helped discover protactinium and first split the nucleus of uranium, creating what her team dubbed "fission".
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| "Meitnerium" in different languages. |
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| Sources
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| First synthetically produced by bombarding 209Bi with accelerated nuclei of 58Fe.
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| Uses
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| None. |
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| History
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| Meitnerium was first synthesized on August 29, 1982 by a German research team led by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung) in Darmstadt. The team bombarded a target
of bismuth-209 with accelerated nuclei of iron-58. The synthesis of this element demonstrated that nuclear fusion techniques could be used to make new, heavy nuclei.
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| The name meitnerium was suggested in honor of the Austrian physicist and mathematician Lise Meitner, but there was an element naming controversy as to what the elements from 101 to 109 were to be called; thus IUPAC adopted
unnilennium as a temporary, systematic element name. In 1997, however, the dispute was resolved and the current name was adopted.
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| Notes
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| In August of 1997 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced the official naming of this element as Meitnerium.
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| Element 109 was previously known as Unnilennium; from the latin for "one zero nine". |
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