It is after 1925, when scientists discovered the last naturally occurring element on the periodic table, they have recently found a new element - rather the heaviest of all found till date! — a superheavy element. It is known as 118, said to have existed in three different atoms that last a fraction of a second over months of experiments. The last new elements discovered were 113 and 115, and were announced in 2004.

According to ABC News, the American and Russian scientists bombarded californium with calcium ions and created the heaviest ever created element in such experiments. It is carried out at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna in Russia.

In explaining the significance of the discovery, Nancy Stoyer, a member of the Livermore team said,

I think of this like any other journey to a new place. Why do you want to go to the moon? Why do you want to go to the top of Mount Everest?

Finding it is something new, it is something interesting... Finding it experimentally helps the theorists understand what really works for their theory and gives us more things to look for.