Copernicium

Copernicium is element 112. Sigurd Hofmann's team at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, made it in 1996 by fusing zinc nuclei with lead. It was named in 2010 after Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who argued that Earth orbits the Sun.

Its atoms survive for up to about half a minute, long enough for single-atom chemistry. Experiments reported in 2007 showed that copernicium is very volatile and clings only weakly to gold surfaces, like a more aloof cousin of mercury, the element above it. Calculations suggest that in bulk it might be a liquid or even a gas at room temperature, though no one can make enough to check.