Tennessine is a synthetic chemical element named after the state of Tennessee.
Core Principles & Analysis
Tennessine was discovered in 2010 at Dubna using a calcium-48 beam on a berkelium-249 target: 22 milligrams painstakingly made at Oak Ridge and rushed to Russia before its 330-day half-life eroded it.
Named in 2016 for Tennessee, home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it is only the second element named after a US state, following californium.
Its known isotopes, tennessine-293 and -294, live for tens of milliseconds; though placed under the halogens, calculations predict tennessine behaves more like a metal than like iodine.