Meitnerium

Meitnerium is element 109. In 1982 the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, fired iron nuclei at a bismuth target and, after days of bombardment, detected a single atom of the new element. It is named after Lise Meitner, the Austrian-Swedish physicist who helped explain nuclear fission and is widely seen as having been overlooked for a Nobel Prize.

Meitnerium has been made only in tiny numbers, and its atoms decay within seconds. No experiment has yet studied its chemistry. From its place below iridium, scientists predict it would be a dense, unreactive metal, a heavier relative of iridium and platinum.