By Lance Ulanoff From Mashable

Element 117, a super-heavy atom with a long half-life is, according to an international team of scientists, real and ready to take its place on the Periodic Table.

Scientists actually confirmed the existence and lifetime of the element in 2010 thanks to experiments conducted by teams in Russia and the U.S. However, now researchers in Germany and the U.S. have created the actual element, which is reportedly 40% heavier than an atom of lead, according to a report in Phys.org.

It wasn’t easy to make element 117, whose temporary name refers to the 117 protons in its nucleus, according to LiveScience. Scientists took 18 months to create the material, berkelium, needed to synthesize it. U.S.-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) created the isotope and then a team at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, blasted it with its accelerator. They then pulled 117 atoms out of the nuclear reactions.

Of the 114 confirmed elements on the Periodic Table, 92 of them occur in nature, the rest have been guessed at, discovered and, in some cases, confirmed and synthesized.

The still-unnamed 117 isn’t alone, though. All elements after 104 are considered “Super Heavy Elements” and reside in a portion of the Periodic Table known theoretically as the Island of Stability. Wikipedia describes these elements as a set of “undiscovered heavier isotopes of transuranium elements which are theorized to be much more stable than some of those closer in atomic number to uranium.

While super-heavy elements tend to decay in nanoseconds, those in the island of