Resolution criteria

This market resolves YES if, before January 1, 2030, the synthesis or discovery of a chemical element with an atomic number greater than 118 is announced.

The discovery has to be confirmed:

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), via their Joint Working Party (JWP) on discovery of elements, officially recognize the discovery. If those organisations no longer function as the authority on the matter, this condition may be altered.

The market is about the date of the discovery, not confirmation, if the discovery is announced but neither confirmed nor debunked at close date, the market will stay open until consensus is reached.

Background (AI generated)

The periodic table currently ends with element 118, oganesson (Og), which was first synthesized in 2002 and officially recognized by IUPAC in late 2015. Discovering element 119 (provisionally ununennium) or element 120 (unbinilium) would mark the start of period 8 and offer insight into the theorized "island of stability".

Active research efforts to produce elements 119 and 120 are ongoing at several global facilities, notably RIKEN in Japan (using vanadium-51 beams on curium targets), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia, GSI Helmholtz Centre in Germany, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the US. However, synthesis requires extremely rare nuclear fusion cross-sections, meaning experiment runs often require months to years of continuous accelerator beam time to observe even a single decay chain.