New Periodic Table Elements Named After Japan, Moscow And Tennessee

(Photo : Getty Images/KAZUHIRO NOGI) Kosuke Morita led the Riken Institute team that successfully created the new element 113, now dubbed nihonium.

Four new elements have been added to the periodic table and three of them will be named after places.

On Wednesday, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the ruling body on chemical element names, revealed the proposed names for four new elements, ABC News reported.

Three of the elements will be named after Moscow, Japan and Tennessee, while the last one honors a Russian scientist.

The teams who discovered the elements have submitted their proposals for the name of their respective element to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which in turn presented the names for public review.

Element 115, which was discovered by a team composed of scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt Univesity in Tennessee, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been given the name moscovium (mah-SKOH'-vee-um), which has the symbol Mc.

Discovered and named by the same team, element 117 was proposed to be called tennessine (TEH'-neh-seen), with the symbol Ts.

Joseph Hamilton, a Vanderbilt physics professor who was part of the discovering team, suggested naming element 117 for Tennessee. He originally proposed that the symbol Tn be used for tennessine, but the symbol had already been taken by another element.

Tenneessee follows California, which was the first U.S. state to have been honored with an element.

Meanwhile, element 113, the first element to be discovered in Asia, was given the name nihonium (nee-HOH'-nee-um) and the symbol Nh. The name was derived from Nihon, which is one way of saying Japan, the country where the element was discovered.

Kosuke Morita, a research group director at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science, revealed that they chose the name to recognize the contribution of the Japanese people and government in the project.

"We wanted to show our research has been supported by the Japanese people," he said, according to the publication.

The last of the four new elements, element 118, has been dubbed oganesson (OJ'-gah-NEH'-sun), which has the symbol Og, after Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian.

The public comment period for the names of the four new elements ends on Nov. 8.