no⋅bel⋅i⋅um
[noh-bel-ee-uh
m, -bee-lee-] 
| a transuranic element in the actinium series. Symbol: No; atomic number: 102. |
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
Cite This Source
| no·bel·i·um (nō-běl'ē-əm) n. Symbol No A radioactive transuranic element in the actinide series with atomic number 102, artificially produced in trace amounts. Its most long-lived isotopes are No 254 with a half-life of 55 seconds, No 253 with a half-life of 1.7 minutes, No 255 with a half-life of 3.1 minutes, and No 259 with a half-life of 58 minutes. See Table at element. [After Alfred Bernhard Nobel.] |
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source
Main Entry: no·bel·i·um
Pronunciation: nO-'bel-E-&m
Function: noun
: a radioactive element produced artificially —symbolNo; —see ELEMENT table
Noábel /nO-'bel/, Alfred Bernhard (1833–1896),Swedish inventor and philanthropist. A manufacturer of explosives, Nobel developed many inventions, his first in 1863 being a detonator for liquid nitroglycerin. Later, after considerableexperimentation, he patented dynamite in 1867. His invention transformed the manufacture of explosives. He is most famous for bequeathing his fortune for the establishment of the Nobel Prizes. Nobeliumwas discovered in 1957.
Cite This Source
nobelium no·bel·i·um (nō-běl'ē-əm)
n.
Symbol No
A radioactive synthetic element in the actinide series; its longest-lived isotope is No 259 with a half-life of 58 minutes. Atomic number 102.
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Cite This Source
| nobelium (nō-běl'ē-əm) Pronunciation Key
Symbol No A synthetic, radioactive metallic element in the actinide series that is produced by bombarding curium with carbon ions. Its longest-lived isotope is No 255 with a half-life of 3.1 minutes. Atomic number 102. See Periodic Table. |
Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source
nobelium
synthetic chemical element of the actinoid series of the periodic table, atomic number 102. Not occurring in nature, nobelium (as the isotope nobelium-254) was discovered (April 1958) by Albert Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, J.R. Walton, and Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley, as a product of the bombardment of curium (atomic number 96) with carbon ions (atomic number 6) accelerated in a heavy-ion linear accelerator. An international team of scientists working at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm had claimed less than a year before that they had synthesized the same element, which they named nobelium (for Alfred Nobel); but experiments performed in the Soviet Union (at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, Moscow, and at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna) and in the United States (University of California, Berkeley) failed to confirm the discovery. The Berkeley and Dubna teams have subsequently produced more than a half dozen isotopes of nobelium; nobelium-255 (three-minute half-life) is the stablest. Using traces of this isotope, radiochemists have shown nobelium to exist in aqueous solution in both the +2 and +3 oxidation states. The +2 state is very stable, an effect more pronounced than was anticipated in comparison with the homologous lanthanoid element ytterbium (atomic number 70)
Learn more about nobelium with a free trial on Britannica.com.
Cite This Source
Copyright © 2009, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.
