From the Archives (April 27, 1971): Detecting super heavy elements

Indian scientists have found evidence confirming the existence of super heavy elements, so far unknown to scientists. This was stated here [New Delhi] to-day [April 26] by Prof. M. G. K. Menon, Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay and Chairman of the Electronics Commission who was delivering the founder memorial lecture of the Shri Ram Institute for Industrial Research. Prof. Menon said a group of scientists led by Prof. Dr. Lal of the Tata Institute made this discovery by studying extra-terrestrial materials such as meteorites and lunar samples using the fossil track technique. He said the group found evidence for the existence of plutonium-244 and also of extremely heavy elements of charge 115 and mass 300 in both lunar and meteorite samples. Such super heavy elements had not yet been synthesised in the laboratory, he said. Prof. Menon said beyond the heaviest element uranium with a charge of 92, only extremely unstable transuranic elements of charge upto 105 had been discovered by scientists so far. He said studies by the Tata institute group suggested that super heavy elements that went even beyond these transuranic elements could have been produced in appreciable quantities during nucleo-synthesis or the “stellar cooking” of elements. The studies were of “remarkable interest” for both nuclear physics and astrophysics, he added.