Meitnerium
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Contributor: Contribution from the University of Limerick.
About the Display: Ersttagsbrief 11th of July, 1978 stamped in Vienna, Austria.
A commemorative envelope featuring Lise Meitner 鈥� Lise Meitner was an Austrian physicist. After obtaining her Ph.D. in thermodynamics in 1905, she starts working on radioactivity, recently discovered by Henri Becquerel. After successfully finding several new isotopes, she isolates and characterizes Protactinium in 1917. From a Jewish family, she must flee from Germany and settles in Sweden in 1938. Her former collaborator Otto Hahn, still in Germany, finds Barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Puzzled, he asks Lise for advice, and she correctly interprets the result as听 nuclear fission (equation below). While she did not share the resulting Nobel Prize with Otto Hahn, she received numerous prestigious awards.
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Symbol:听Mt
Atomic Number: 109
Atomic Mass: 278 u
Electron Configuration:听[Rn] 5f146d77s2听
Year Discovered: 1982
Discovered By:听Peter Armbruster, Gottfried M眉nzenberg and colleagues