Element 118: If You Blinked, You Missed It

That's cool. It sounds like a short amount of time but they can find out a lot about an element in a millisecond. Many reactions occur in picoseconds or femtoseconds, which is a million, or a billion times faster than the lifetime of this element. It's good research because it gives insight into the internal structure of atoms and it tests whether these new elements fit well into the periodic table (in terms of properties).

I am not a physicist, obviously, so this may seem a stupid question, but is it possible that somewhere in the universe there are other elements that do not exist on earth, yet are stable, or at least have one stable, or very long half-lived isotope? Or are these heavy elements, by their very nature unstable and extremely radioactive?

Also, how do we know that 118 is a "noble gas", just because it falls into that column on the Periodic Table? Existing for such a short period, how do we know that it is "noble", unable to form compounds with other atoms, or that is it woud even even be a "gas", at what we would consider a "normal" temperature and pressure.

To your first question, yes, it is possible that other elements exists elsewehere.

To your second, noble gases is a phrase used when the elements were discovered. No compounds of these elements were known. Since then, compounds have been made with these elements. The new element would have just fit into the periodic table under these gases, because of it's electronic structure.

Gas is a relative term. At high enough temperatures, every element is a gas.