IN A FEW WEEKS kids will have to learn the name of another element when they are taught the periodic table.

A gaggle of boffins has just approved the entry of a new element called Copernicium. Armed with the atomic number 112, the element has been known by the handle ununbium after it was discovered by by a group led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany.

Obviously the name ununbium was too close to "up your bum" to be safely mentioned in schools so they settled on using the name of the most hyped astronomer next to Galileo, Copernicus instead. Copernicus is credited with the discovery that the earth went round the sun when in fact he only mathematically proved that the earth went around a invisible point just in front of the sun.

According to New Scientist magazine, Copernicium's discovery was a bit of a soap opera.

In 1996, Hofmann and his team found the atom in their detector after firing a beam of zinc atoms at a piece of lead. The atom's nucleus decayed in several stages, releasing an alpha particle, composed of two neutrons and two protons, at each stage. The alpha particle from the sixth decay had an energy and lifetime which matched those of an alpha particle from an atom of nobelium, the element which has atomic number 102. Since the preceding five stages removed a total of 10 protons, Hofmann's team worked out that the nucleus of the original atom must have contained 112 protons.

But there was something wrong with the energy of the alpha particle emitted in the fifth stage of decay and this led the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to reject Hofmann's first bid to have the element recognised.

The next year Hofmann's team announced that when they examined their raw data files they could find no evidence for initial problem and they thought that it had been "spuriously created" by a collaborator, Victor Ninov. Hofman was furious. Later Ninov was fired by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after it emerged that he had manipulated a different set of results relating to another synthetic element.

But when Hofmann's team reran the experiment and submitted further evidence for element 112, IUPAC again rejected the claim on the grounds that the decay chain was different to the first and could not be repeated.

Then Kosuke Morita at the RIKEN superheavy element laboratory in Wako, Japan, made two atoms of element 112. He found that there were two alpha decay paths that rutherfordium could take and then the IUPAC was happy.

Containing 112 protons, Copernicium has 20 more protons than uranium, the heaviest of the naturally occurring elements.

It seems appropriate that at the start of the 21st century we find an atom that is battling obesity. µ