Bob Lazar on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1315

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Element 115, later named moscovium, was first synthesized in 2003 (published in Physical Review C in February 2004) by a joint Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, not in Darmstadt, Germany. Researchers bombarded an americium-243 target with calcium-48 ions in JINR's Flerov Laboratory cyclotron, producing four observed decay chains, consistent with the claimed atom count. Darmstadt, Germany is home to the GSI Helmholtz Centre, a real superheavy-element laboratory that co-discovered several other elements and later used its TASCA separator (around 2021) to produce additional moscovium isotopes for chemistry studies, which may explain the confusion, but GSI was not involved in the original 2003 discovery of element 115. Reported decay-chain lifetimes from the original synthesis were on the order of roughly tens of milliseconds to about a second per chain, not a single uniform 220-millisecond duration for all four atoms. The element was formally named moscovium in 2016, with the name referencing the Moscow region where Dubna is located, reinforcing that Russia, not Germany, is the discovery site.