I learned this today. It is possible, but it is not easy, takes a lot of power, and the resultant element would not be very stable.
There are 118 known elements that appear on the periodic table. The first 94 of them occur naturally on Earth and the other 24 are artificial.
Scientists started to try to group elements together in the 18th century. Antoine Lavoisier grouped them into metals and nonmetals. In 1860, the first international conference of chemistry decided that the elements would be arranged by atomic mass. Hydrogen would have the atomic mass of 1 and all other elements would be compared to hydrogen. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the elements by atomic order and left gaps for the elements that he knew must exist but hadn’t yet been discovered. He had 66 elements.
So, what differentiates one element from another? An element consists of an atom whose nucleus has a certain number of protons. A proton is a subatomic particle that has a positive electric charge. It is different to an electron, which has a negative charge, and 1836 times the mass of an electron. The number of protons that the atom has is called its atomic number. Hydrogen has 1 proton, so its atomic number is 1. This is why hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and the beginning fuel for stars. Because it only has one proton and one electron, it is the simplest element and therefore the most abundant.
To make another element on the periodic table, the atom needs to gain protons. Helium is the next element up the periodic table and it has two protons, so its atomic number is two. It also has two neutrons, which are subatomic particles with a neutral charge. To make helium, four hydrogen atoms have to combine. Each hydrogen atom has one proton. When four hydrogen atoms are combined, two of the protons lose their charge, becoming neutrons, and the other two protons stay as protons. However, you cannot make hydrogen into helium just by putting the atoms next to each other. They have to fuse.
This is one reason why it is so hard to make elements. Each of the protons in the hydrogen atoms are positive and positive charges repel positive charges. This is called Coulomb repulsion. To make a new element, the hydrogen atoms have to be travelling so fast that they hit each other hard enough to overcome the Coulomb force, getting close enough together that they are held in place by the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces. It takes so much energy to do this, that it only naturally happens in the center of suns. The gravity pressure gives the atoms enough energy to combine. This is called nuclear fusion.
The center of a star goes through phases and creates every element up to iron. When all the hydrogen has become helium, it then turns the helium into carbon, the carbon into oxygen, then neon, then silicon, then magnesium, then sulfur, and finally iron. The star cannot provide enough energy to convert iron. However, the star collapses under its own weight and explodes, becoming a neutron star and giving enough energy to the iron to become all the rest of the elements that are naturally found in the periodic table.
To make elements that are not on this natural periodic table, scientists try to get different elements to fuse. For example, if they fire neon atoms at a uranium atom with enough energy, they can get it to overcome the Coulomb repulsion and fuse. Neon has ten protons and uranium 92, making the element nobelium, which has an atomic number of 102.
The problem is that these elements are extremely unstable and only last for seconds, sometimes milliseconds. The reason for this is that the protons all have the same positive charge and they all repel each other. They are held together by the strong force, but as the number of protons increases, the strong force has more and more trouble holding them in. There comes a point where the strong force is overcome by the repulsion and the element decays into a more stable element.
Right now, ununoctium is the heaviest element with an atomic number of 118, but scientists are trying to make an element with 119. They do it by firing a beam of ionized titanium (22 protons) down a tube at 10% the speed of light into a target studded with berkelium atoms (97 protons). In every one billion impacts, the titanium and the berkelium fuse, creating a new atom, which decays almost as soon as it is created.
Nobody knows the maximum number of protons an atom can have. Maybe one day there will be a way to make them more stable.
So, new elements can be made, but it requires a terrific amount of energy. When the element is made, it usually has too many protons to be held together by its strong force and it decays down to a more stable element extremely quickly. And that is what I learned today.
Photo By User:Double sharp, – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98955505
Sources:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-create-new-elements
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/make-an-element/
https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/what-it-takes-to-make-a-new-element/1017677.article
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=15066&t=how-do-chemists-make-new-elements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/020721/a-brief-history-of-the-periodic-table
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6899