flerovium

Russian postal stamp celebrating the 100th anniversary of Georgy Flerov’s birth and the naming of element 114 after the laboratory named for him

18 August 2023

Flerovium is an artificially created element with atomic number 114 and symbol Fl. Flerovium isotopes have half-lives less than two seconds, although more stable forms have been theorized. Only some ninety flerovium atoms have been produced and detected, so the element obviously has no practical uses beyond research. It was first synthesized in 1998 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.

The element is named after the Flerov* Laboratory of JINR. The laboratory itself is named for physicist Georgy Flerov (1913–90). Flerovium had been previously proposed as a name for a number of other elements, including element 102 (nobelium) before IUPAC approved it for element 114.

The proposed name, along with that of element 116 (livermorium), was announced at the closing ceremony of the International Year of Chemistry held in Brussels on 1 December 2011. The JINR’s press release about the naming of 2 December 2011 reads, in part:

With Professor Yuri Oganessian as spokesperson the collaborators have proposed the name flerovium (symbol Fl) for element number 114 and the name livermorium (symbol Lv) for that with number 116. […]

Both of the names proposed lie within the long tradition of the choice of names for elements. The proposal for 114 will honour the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions where the superheavy elements are synthesised. Georgiy N. Flerov (1913 – 1990) is recognised as a renowned physicist, author of the discovery of the spontaneous fission of uranium (1940, with Konstantin A. Petrzhak), pioneer in heavy-ion physics; and founder in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (1957).

The names of both elements were officially approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) the following year.

*The name Флёров is perhaps more accurately transliterated as Flyorov, but I’ve maintained the Flerov spelling here because it is the more usual transliteration and for consistency with the spelling of the element’s name.

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Sources:

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). “Names Proposed for Elements of Atomic Number 114 and 116” (press release), 2 December 2011.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. flerovium, n.

Image credit: MARKA Publishing & Trading Centre, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image

comet

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), 1 February 2023

16 August 2023

A comet is a solar-system object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust, which sublimates into a “tail” when its orbit takes it close to the sun. Short-period comets, those with orbital periods less than two hundred years, originate in the Kuiper belt, while long-period comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud.

The word comet has a straightforward etymology. It was borrowed into Old English from the Latin cometa, which in turn comes from the Greek κομήτης (komete, long-haired), short for ἀστὴῤ κομήτης (aster kometes, long-haired star). The word’s use in English was subsequently reinforced by the Anglo-Norman comete.

The following is the account of the return of Halley’s Comet in the year 1066 that appears in the Worcester Chronicle:

Portion of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1066

MLXVI. On þissum geare com Harold cyng of Eoferwic to Westmynstre · to þam Eastran · þe wæron þa Eastran on þone dæg XVI. K[alends] Mai. Þa wearð geond eall England swylc taken on heofenum gesewen swylce nan man ær ne geseah. Sume men cwedon þ[æt] hit cometa se steorra wære · þone sume men hatað þone fæxedon steorran · & he ateowde ærest on þone æfen Letania Maior · VIII. K[alends] Mai · & swa scan ealle þa seofan niht.

(1066. In this year King Harold came from York to Westminster at Easter, which was the Easter then on the sixteenth Kalends of May [16 April]. Then was seen over all England such a sign in the heavens as no man had ever seen before. Some men said that the star was a comet, that some men call the hairy star, and it first appeared on the eve of Litania major, the eighth Kalends of May [24 April]. And it shone all the seven nights.)

Since antiquity, the appearance of a comet has been thought to be an omen of a momentous event or disaster. And in 1066 for once, that turned out to be the case.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. comete, n.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. cometa, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. comete, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. comet, n.

Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, vol. 1 of 2. London: Longman, Green Longman, and Roberts, 1861, 336. HathiTrust Digital Library. London. British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.iv.

Image credits: Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF): David Wilton, 2023. This photo is licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Bayeux Tapestry: Myrabella, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

bordello

Salon at the Rue des Moulins (1894), by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

14 August 2023

A bordello is, of course, a brothel, a house of prostitution. It is an example of a word that has been borrowed into English multiple times at different points in history.

Bordello is a sixteenth-century borrowing from Italian, but it has an earlier form bordel, dating to c. 1300, that is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman. The Anglo-Norman originally, c. 1185, meant a cottage or hut but came to mean a brothel by around 1300, about the time the word started to be used in English. The French and Italian words come from the post-classical Latin bordellum, meaning a cottage or small land holding. Bordellum appears in Anglo-Latin from c. 1100. (The Anglo-Latin word would later, in the late fourteenth century, also acquire the sense of a brothel, but this sense would be due to influence from the English and Anglo-Norman.)

Bordel appears in English writing c. 1300 in the Life of St. Lucy found in the collection of hagiographies known as the Early South English Legendary. Lucy was condemned to a brothel for refusing to marry a pagan man and for giving to the poor her wealth, which legally belonged to the man she was supposed to marry. One version of the life has this exchange between the judge and Lucy:

“I-wedded ich was to Ihesu crist,” : þis holie maide him tolde
“Þo ich was i-baptized : and þulke weddinge ichulle holde.
Ake to hore-dome þov wouldest me bringue : ȝwane þov me wouldest make
Mine spousede louerd Ihesu crist : for ani oþur man for-sake.”
“Þou schalt for-sake him,” quath þe Iustise : “haddest þou it i-swore :
For to þe commune bordel þov schalt beo :  i-lad oþur i-bore,
And þare schal mani a moder-child : go to þi foule licame
And ligge bi þe, alle þat wollez : in hore-dom and in schame.”

(“I was wed to Jesus Christ,” this holy maid told him. “At the time I was baptized, and it was ordained that I should have that marriage. Yet to whoredom you would bring me when you would make me forsake my spouse, the lord Jesus Christ, for any other man.”

“You shall forsake him,” said the judge, “whom you had promised. For to a common bordel you shall be taken or carried, and there shall many a mother’s child go to your foul body and lie with you, all that will, in whoredom and in shame.”)

Bordello, borrowed from the Italian, first appears in a 1581 anti-Catholic tract:

Wisdome is requisite in a Pope, whereby he may knowe golde from siluer, gemmes and precious stones, fro[m] common stones which bee in the streetes. Hee must haue wisedome to counte them, wisedome to locke them vp in his treasure house: hee cannot bee without wisedome to picke out the best golde from the badde, to giue to his waiting gentlewomen at bed and boorde. Hee must moreouer haue wisedome to prouide for his bastardely children, which hee begot whiles hee was a soule Priest to the Putanne in the Burdello or whilest hee saide Masse elswhere for money, to supplie the necessitie of any sober Curtezane, and defloured Virgin

Note that bordello, or burdello, appears in an Italian context and is italicized in the book, indicating that the word was not fully anglicized by this date. But it would quickly be picked up and replace bordel as the more common form.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. bordel, n.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. bordellum, bordellus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “Vita sancta Lucie uirginis.” The Early South English Legendary. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 103, lines 91–98. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. bordel, n.(1).

Nicholls, John. Pilgrimage, Whrein Is Diplaied the Liues of the Proude Popes, Ambitious Cardinals, Lecherous Bishops, Fat Bellied Monkes, and Hypocriticall Iesuites. London: Thomas Dawson, 1581, sig. C3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2022, s.v. bordello, n.

Image credit: Painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1894. Public domain work. Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Didier Descouens, 2021, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

europium

A 300g block of pure Europium

11 August 2023

Europium is a silvery-white metal that develops a dark oxide coating when exposed to air. Pure europium has relatively few uses, notably in the production of some types of optical glass. Its oxides are used as phosphors in television sets and computer screens and as an anti-counterfeiting measure in Euro bank notes. It has atomic number 63 and the symbol Eu

As early as 1896, chemist Eugène-Anatole Demarçay suspected that samples of samarium contained a novel element, and he was able to isolate it 1901 and proposed naming it after the continent of Europe, making it the first element to be discovered and named in the twentieth century.

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Sources:

Demarçay, Eugène-Anatole. “Sur Un Nouvel Élément, l’Europium.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 132, Jan–Jun 1901, 1484–86 at 1485. HathiTrust Digital Archive. 

Miśkowiec, Paweł. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. europium, n.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) License.

precovery

Example of precovery images showing Jupiter’s moon Valetudo. The moon was discovered in 2017 but later found in this archived shot from 2003. Each of three images in the gif were taken 21 minutes apart.

9 August 2023

Precovery is a term originating in the astronomy community that refers to the finding of evidence of an astronomical object’s existence in archival images and data after the object has been discovered. Precover is also a verb. The term is a blend, or portmanteau, either of pre- + [dis]covery or of pre[-discovery re]covery. The word has been in use by astronomers for over thirty years, but has yet to make it into any of the major general dictionaries, probably because the term rarely appears outside of astronomical papers and such jargon rarely makes it into general dictionaries.

The earliest use of precovery, in the plural form precoveries, that I’m aware of is in a 1991 paper in the Australian Journal of Astronomy:

Another classification of observation we term “precoveries.” These are newly discovered NEAs for which we have identified observations on UKST [U.K. Schmidt Telescope] plates taken in the past. Accurate measurements of these plates thus allow the orbits to be immediately determined, and thus the objects secured.

The use of “we term” hints that this may be the actual coinage of the word, but all we can say for certain is that it indicates the word was quite new in astronomical circles in 1991.

The verb is in place by 1995, when it is used in a paper given at the International Astronomical Union Colloquium of that year:

The asteroids of most interest to us are those which approach the Earth, and whenever such an object is found (by anyone) we perform back-integrations in order to determine whether the object may have been recorded on any UKST plate taken since 1973. In many cases the object is found (“precovered”) and measured, allowing an accurate orbit to be determined soon after its discovery.

That same paper also uses the noun:

Recently a similar object, (5145) Pholus = 1992 AD, was found by the University of Arizona Spacewatch team. The earliest images of Pholus were measured from UKST plates taken in 1977 and 1982. These images were identified following the “precovery” (or pre-discovery recovery) of the object by E.M. and C.S. Shoemaker on films taken with the 0.46 m Palomar Schmidt, and by J.Mueller on plates taken with the 1.2m Palomar Schmidt.

The term continues to appear in the ensuing decades, but in most instances it remains within quotation marks or is otherwise explained, indicating the authors or journal editors did not think it would be familiar to a large portion of their readership. There is this from Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2001:

The Arcetri Near Earth Object Precovery Program (ANEOPP) is a project dedicated to the identification of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) on past archival materials, an activity usually referred to as precovery.

And this from the 2001 book Collisional Processes in the Solar System:

It involves a specific agreement with the MPC [Minor Planet Center] on the share of specific responsibilities, the set-up of new observatories in locations where there are none or only a few, an inquiry on the content and location of image archives that may reveal a "gold mine" for past, undetected observations of newly discovered objects (usually called prediscoveries, or "precoveries"). This last possibility is of great interest, as has been recently demonstrated by the precovery of the NEO [Near-Earth Object]1997 XF11 in films taken at Palomar in 1990 by the teams of E.F. Helin and of E.M. and C.S. Shoemaker: these precoveries have transformed a few-months arc into an 8-years arc, allowing a far better determination of the orbit of this rather intriguing PHO [potentially hazardous object].

There is an example of the word used without marking or comment in a 2010 PhD dissertation:

These observations were used to calculate an orbital ephemeris, and to precover additional data from 10 nights in 2005, as well as 7 subsequent nights in 2007.

But that may show the difference between more informal of the term by astronomers and how the term is presented in journals—unlike dissertations—that have copyeditors who look out for such terms. Here is an example of the term placed within quotation marks in a 2021 article in the Astronomical Journal:

We developed simulations that demonstrated the ability to use archival photometric data in combination with TESS to “precover” the orbital period for these candidates with a precision of several minutes, assuming circular orbits

Occasionally, precovery makes its way out of the confines of astronomy circles and into general publications. The earliest that I have found is in a 9 April 2005 article in the Washington Post about an asteroid that passed close to earth. The article was reprinted in a number of other papers in the following days:

By Dec. 26, the impact probability had risen to one chance in 38. What the plotters needed was a “precovery,” an overlooked observation from before Tholen’s initial June fixes to yield a more precise orbital solution.

In Tucson, astronomers at the Spacewatch Project, at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, started searching their archive. Spacewatch has been surveying the solar system for 20 years, and precovery is a specialty.

Precovery is a nice example of how a technical term can circulate within a particular discourse community for decades before anyone outside that community notices it.

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Sources:

Boattini, A., et al. “The Arcetri NEO Precovery Program.” Astronomy & Astrophysics, 375.1 (15 August 2001), 293–307 at 293. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20010825.

Burkhardt, G., et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts: Literature 1991, Part 2. Berlin: Springer, 1992, 631. SpringerLink.

Carusi, A. “NEO, The Spaceguard System and the Spaceguard Foundation.” In Collisional Processes in the Solar System. Mikhail Yakovlevich Marov and Hans Rickman, eds. Astrophysics and Space Science Library 261. Dordrecht: Springer 2001, 341. SpringerLink: Springer eBooks.

Gugliotta, Guy. “Earth Dodges Big One, For Now.” Washington Post, 9 April 2005, A6-1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Kaib, Nathan A. “Numerical Models of Oort Cloud Formation and Delivery.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2010, 134. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

McNaught, R. H., et al. “Near-Earth Asteroids on Archival Schmidt Plates.” International Astronomical Union Colloquium, 148, 1995, 170–173 at 170 and 171. CambridgeCore: Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union.

Steel, D. and R. H. McNaught. “The Anglo-American Near-Earth Asteroid Survey.” Australian Journal of Astronomy, 4.2, October 1991, 42–48 at 47.

Yao, Xinyu, et al. “Following Up TESS Single Transits with Archival Photometry and Radial Velocities." The Astronomical Journal, 161.3, 16 February 2021, 1–14 at 1. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/abdb30.

Photo credit: Brett J. Gladman/Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, 2003. Taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope's MegaPrime CCD camera. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.