The Einsteinium Quiz

Answer: Es

The Berkeley, California team that isolated and identified the new elements 99 and 100 in radioactive debris from the first successful, large scale hydrogen bomb explosion (code named Ivy Mike), which took place at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific in November 1952, was given the privilege of naming them. Since the effort leading to the design of the device had been codenamed Project PANDA, element 99 had been nicknamed Pandemonium. When it came time to make an official suggestion, however, they proposed to name the element with atomic number 99 einsteinium (symbol E) and the element with atomic number 100 fermium (symbol Fm), after Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi respectively.

Initially given as E, as the Berkeley group suggested, the symbol for Einsteinium was changed to Es in 1957 by IUPAC (the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), the world authority on chemical nomenclature and terminology including the naming of new elements. The Periodic Table includes no elements with the symbols E, Ei or Et at the time of writing, in July 2023..

Answer: Greater than that of uranium

With an atomic number of 99, the synthetic element einsteinium is a transuranium element, the seventh such to be identified. Its mass number or atomic weight (total number of protons and neutrons) is 252. It falls in Period 7, Block f of the Periodic Table.

Uranium, No. 92, was identified in 1789. At the time of its discovery, it was thought to be the last element on the Periodic Table. However, since Henri Becquerel discovered the element's strange property of radioactivity in 1896, research into that property has been ongoing. One result is the development of ever more sophisticated (and lethal) weapons making use of radioactive elements. Since 1945, ever more transuranium elements have been either synthesized or identified in the debris of such weapons' explosions.

Answer: Actinides/Actinoids

Confusingly, while each column of the Periodic Table is known as a group, the term may also apply to a set of elements with any more or less arbitrarily defined commonality of characteristics. That's how it is being used here.

The term actinide or actinoid applies to the fifteen metallic elements from actinium (atomic number 89) through lawrencium (atomic number 103). They are all radioactive, the heavier ones (those not occurring in nature) being extremely unstable.

Answer: Solid

Einsteinium is a soft, silvery, paramagnetic metal. Yet this statement, while accurate, is misleading. You can't pick up a sheet of einsteinium foil or stash an einsteinium ingot in your safe.

When discussing einsteinium, one must remember that it is powerfully radioactive. It's most stable isotope, 252Es, has a half-life of 471.7 days. Therefore, any primordial einsteinium (atoms of the element that might have existed at or just after the planet's formation some four and a half billion years ago) decayed a very long time ago indeed.

Similarly, scientists can state with confidence that the likelihood of einsteinium's being formed in the ordinary course of things from naturally occurring uranium and thorium is vanishingly small. Though nucleosynthesis (building of heavier elements through the interaction of nucleons) takes place in the cores of stars and during the course of supernova explosions, it is extremely unlikely under Earth's current conditions..

All present day einsteinium is produced in laboratories and high-power nuclear reactors or in nuclear weapons tests. Its most common isotope, 253Es, with a half-life of 20.47 days, is produced artificially from decay of californium-253 (itself a synthetic transuranic actinide) in a few dedicated high-power nuclear reactors with a total yield on the order of one milligram per year.

Don't let the bland term 'produced' fool you. Metals - even ordinary, everyday metals - as we know them in their finished form do not occur in nature. Rather, they must be extracted, prepared and refined in some way. The extraction and preparation of einsteinium as a recognizable metal poses considerable challenges.

For instance, to end with einsteinium-253, the material from the reactor undergoes a complex process of separating that isotope from other actinides and products of their decay. Much smaller amounts of other isotopes are synthesized in various laboratories by bombarding heavy actinide elements with light ions.

Because of its intense radioactivity, released heat of about 1000 watts per gram, einsteinium glows blue in the dark. This same intense radiation constantly damages the metal's cubic crystal lattice. So, though einsteinium is a metal and its phase at room temperature is solid, these terms must be understood as having a somewhat different meaning in the context of transuranic elements than in the everyday world.

A paramagnetic substance is one that is very weakly attracted by the poles of a magnet, but does not retain any permanent magnetism.

Answer: No

Even if you don't know much about chemistry, you probably worked out that the answer is no. Comparing einsteinium and water compares unlike things. Einsteinium (Es) is an element whereas water (H2O) is a compound. Moreover, einsteinium is a solid while water is a liquid (at the temperatures humans find comfortable and hence consider normal) . Naturally, their melting and boiling points are quite different.

The melting point of solid H2O (ice to me and you) is 32 degrees F, 0 degrees C or 273 degrees K. Liquid water's boiling point is 212F, 100C or 373K. By contrast, the melting point of einsteinium is 1580F, 860C or 1133K, while its boiling point is estimated to be 1825F, 996C or 1269 K. The minute size of the samples of the element scientists have to work with, makes determining these points difficult.

Answer: Yes

Einsteinium is highly radioactive. While the element's most stable isotopes have half-lives that can be measured in months, most decay in less than half an hour.

Answer: No

Owing to einsteinium's intense radioactivity and the short half-life of its isotopes, the complexity and arduousness of its production in purified, usable form and its subsequent scarcity the element has no industrial or other for profit applications. That does not mean, though, that it has no uses at all; quite the reverse, in fact. From its discovery, einsteinium has proved useful in basic research. The very manner of its formation, properly understood, solved a fundamental problem in astrophysics.

When investigators initially examined the debris from the Ivy Mike explosion, they found a new isotope of plutonium, 244/94Pu which, they realized, could only have formed by means of a uranium-238 nucleus absorbing six neutrons and then undergoing two beta decays. Since the results of such a process had never been seen before, the investigators assumed the process itself was an extremely rare one. As it turned out, the very fact that 244/94Pu could be synthesized indicated that the uranium nuclei could have captured still more neutrons and so produced elements heavier than californium.

The long and the short of it is, once scientists saw evidence of multiple neutron absorption, they realized they had direct experimental confirmation of cosmic nucleosynthesis of elements heavier than nickel in supernova explosions. Since iron is the heaviest element that can be formed by the ordinary nuclear fusion that powers stars, some mechanism had to exist to create heavier ones. The heat and pressure generated by the explosion of a supernova could, it was conjectured, fuse nuclei into elements heavier than iron. By mimicking aspects of a supernova, the artificial thermonuclear explosion Ivy Mike gave insight into how supernovae create and distribute heavy elements.

Likewise, research seeking to produce higher transuranic elements and super-heavy elements has benefited from the discovery of einsteinium. It was used to synthesize the first ever atoms of mendelevium in 1955in the 60-inch cyclotron at Berkeley Laboratory. When Es53 was irradiated, the reaction yielded 17 atoms of the new element 101.

Isotopes of einsteinium also have practical, if sometimes out of this world, uses. In 1967, NASA employed 254Es as the calibration marker in the chemical analysis spectrometer ("alpha-scattering surface analyzer") of the Surveyor 5 lunar probe, the third spacecraft in the Surveyor series to successfully make a soft landing and the first mission to obtain in-situ compositional data on the Moon. Indeed, it was the first manmade device to complete a soil analysis on another celestial body. In the spectrometer, the large mass of the Es54 isotope reduced the spectral overlap between signals from the marker and those of the lighter elements of the lunar surface being studied.

Answer: Not vital to life

Einsteinium has no known biological function. One would hardly expect it to have one, considering it is only known to exist as a by-product of nuclear fission. Like other synthetic transuranic elements, the powerfully radioactive einsteinium is considered highly toxic.

Most of the available einsteinium toxicity data come from research on animals. For example, when ingested by rats, it settles in the bones, being distributed over their surfaces in a similar manner to plutonium, in the lungs and in the gonads. Extrapolations show that the element remains in these structures for years, permanently in the ovaries.

At the same time, einsteinium shows promise for use in radiation therapy and related research, though your quiz maker could only find tantalizing hints, and no solid information on this point.

Answer: Albert Einstein

Nobel laureate Albert Einstein was born March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire and died April 18, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Though his body of work as a theoretical physicist is considerable, he is popularly known for his Special and General theories of relativity.

Answer: The USA in the early 1950s

In December 1952, Albert Ghiorso and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with the Argonne and Los Alamos National laboratories identified einsteinium and fermium in debris from Ivy Mike. Ghiorso announced the discovery of these new elements at the first Geneva Atomic Conference, held August 8 to 20, 1955, the same year the U.S. government declassified materials relating to the Enewetak Atoll nuclear test.