Synthetic element

A synthetic element is one of 24 known chemical elements that do not occur naturally on Earth: they have been created by human manipulation of fundamental particles in a nuclear reactor, a particle accelerator, or the explosion of an atomic bomb; thus, they are called "synthetic", "artificial", or "man-made".

All known (see: Island of stability) synthetic elements are unstable, but they decay at widely varying rates; the half-lives of their longest-lived isotopes range from microseconds to millions of years.

[4] No elements with atomic numbers greater than 99 have any uses outside of scientific research, since they have extremely short half-lives, and thus have never been produced in large quantities.

[13][14][15][16] The first entirely synthetic element to be made was curium, synthesized in 1944 by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso by bombarding plutonium with alpha particles.

Einsteinium and fermium were discovered by a team of scientists led by Albert Ghiorso in 1952 while studying the composition of radioactive debris from the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb.

During the height of the Cold War, teams from the Soviet Union and the United States independently created rutherfordium and dubnium.