• da_cow (she/her)@feddit.org
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    3 hours ago

    Here’s what the article says:

    Assuming a periodic table in which each element is represented by a 1 cm by 2.5 cm rectangle, 40 rows of 32 elements will take up one meter of space. At this scale, a periodic table incorporating element 1056 would need to be 7.82 × 1052 meters long. This is problematic, because 7.82 × 1052 meters is about 1037 lightyears, and the universe is currently estimated span a mere 93 billion lightyears. As such, the new periodic table would be a quadrillion times larger than the observable universe.

    The universe is expanding, however, which is good news for chemists and first-home buyers. The rate of this expansion is apparently about 73 km/s for every million parsecs of space, which corresponds to 2 × 106 km/s across the entire universe.8 At that rate, the universe will be able to accommodate the new periodic table in about 1034 years.