Moscovium

Moscovium was first created in 2003 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with American laboratories, by fusing americium and calcium nuclei; the discovery was confirmed and the name adopted in 2016. It was named after the Moscow region, the Moscow Oblast, in which Dubna lies. Moscovium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a few atoms. Its isotopes last only fractions of a second and it has no studied chemistry; it decays through a chain of lighter superheavy elements, and it was in tracing that decay chain that its discovery, and those of its neighbours, was finally established.

Moscovium's decay chain passes directly through nihonium, since a moscovium nucleus sheds an alpha particle to become nihonium, which in turn continues decaying further down the table, a genealogical link that meant early moscovium experiments were simultaneously providing some of the first evidence for its neighbour as well. The americium-243 target needed for the synthesis, like the berkelium later used for tennessine, was supplied by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, underscoring how thoroughly the discovery of the periodic table's final elements depended on a handful of specialised reactors capable of brewing such targets at all.

Moscovium honours the Moscow Oblast, the administrative region surrounding the Russian capital and containing the town of Dubna, whose Joint Institute for Nuclear Research has been one of the two or three great centres of superheavy-element discovery. The name was chosen, like dubnium before it, to acknowledge the Russian laboratory's leading role, this time invoking the wider region rather than the town itself.

Moscovium was one of four elements, with nihonium, tennessine and oganesson, whose confirmation in 2015 and 2016 completed the seventh row of the periodic table. It has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the twenty-first century with no existence outside the laboratory; its name is a geographic tribute to the Russian heartland of heavy-element research. Element 115 acquired an unusual cultural afterlife years before its official naming, having been used since 2008 as a fictional, supposedly extraterrestrial power source in the Call of Duty video game franchise's Zombies storyline, a piece of pop culture that gave the real, still-unnamed element a strange kind of fame among gamers well before chemists finished confirming and naming the actual moscovium.