Four new elements officially added to the periodic table

Last December, four new elements—with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118—earned their spots on the periodic table. They were temporarily named ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium, and ununoctium until the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry revealed their “unofficial” names in June. Now that the period for public comment is over, those names are finally official, The New York Times reports. Three of the elements were named after locations of scientists’ institutions: Tennessine (Tennessee), Nihonium (Japan) and Moscovium (Moscow). Yuri Oganessian, a nuclear physics professor at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, inspired the fourth, Oganesson. The four elements, synthetically created in labs, round out the seventh row of the table.