Ununpentium: The Mystery Element
By William Lile

6th Period Chemistry, Mr. Steineker, Eastern High School

There are many elements that one can see on the periodic table like gold, iron and cobalt. But one that most wouldn’t know about is Ununpentium. Possibly because it is a fairly new element or maybe it doesn’t have any uses; that is what I will address.

It was created by a Russian team of scientists at The Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (JINR), located in Dubna, Russia, and American scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. On February 2, 2004, it was found by the team by bombarding americium-243 with calcium-48 ions; it produced 4 atoms of ununpentium. They then reported that the atoms decayed by the emission of alpha particles to ununtrium (113) in approximately 100 milliseconds.

Sergei Dmitriev from the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) in Dubna; had put forward the claim of discovery of ununpentium to the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP)

. In 2011, the IUPAC evaluated the results and concluded that they didn’t meet the criteria for a new discovery. Ununpentium’s actual name is eka-bismuth; it was renamed temporarily to ununpentium due to the IUPAC systematic element name derived from the numbers 115 where "un-" represents Latin unum. "Pent-" represents the Greek word for 5, and it was chosen because the Latin word for 5 ("quin"), starts with 'q', which would have caused confusion with flerovium (previously known as ununquadium), element 114. Researchers usually refer to it as element 115.
The physical properties of ununpentium are very few, scientists have either not tested a certain property or are not focused on it. Ununpentium is in a presumed stable state, scientists that have tested it have not found a permanently stable isotope of 115. It has an atomic weight of 289 with no stable isotopes known to date. It has no melting point (hasn’t been tested), neither does it have or give any heat. There is also no known data of its atomic radius or density, making ununpentium an element of almost pure mystery. It also happens to be highly radioactive and harmful to the human body, making it a useless element for anything besides testing as of yet.

Same as the physical, there is little to no data of its chemical properties. Ununpentium has no data of reaction partners, letting scientists assume how it would react. They believe it would react like bismuth and/or antimony. There is no data of electronegativity for ununpentium on the Pauling scale. No data is present of ionization energy of ununpentium.

Ununpentium’s placement on the periodic table is 15th group from the top and 7th group from the left.

Ununpentium’s Electron Configuration and Lewis Dot Structure

Interesting side notes
It just so happens that Ununpentium’s first major appearance is in a video game called Call Of Duty: Black Ops. It is used in a side game called Nazi Zombies as a way of bringing the zombies to life and a way to “upgrade” the various weapons you would receive to make them more powerful. It is widely assumed that the radioactive properties of Ununpentium would make this possible, turning the dead to shambling corpses and even making a weapon.

The Germans, at the height of WW2, had been trying to construct ways to overcome the allies, super human testing and experimental weapons. The weapon that I speak of is – and would have been named – WunderWaffe DG-2 (wonder weapon in German translation). It had a backpack style power unit that would’ve held the Ununpentium as its source, using the radiation as a way to literally melt the internal organs of an unfortunate soldier by charging the bullets that would’ve been fired from an automatic rifle (as seen above).
It had also been used in a quite popular online game known as World of Warcraft, being an item that would significantly decrease the stats of the player’s avatar.

Sources:
http://www.webelements.com/ununpentium/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununpentium
Call Of Duty: Black Ops
World of Warcraft