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Nobelium                                                                                                                              

Standard Sate: unknown but presumably a solid at 298 K

Color: unknown, but very probably metallic and silvery white or grey in appearance

Nobelium is a radioactive "rare earth metal" named after Alfred Nobel who discovered dynamite.

(NO), synthetic chemical element of the actinide series in Group IIIb
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
lanthanide element ytterbium (atomic number 70).

For a discussion of the properties and applications of the actinide
group, of which nobelium is a member, see actinide element. atomic
number 102 stablest isotope 255 valence 2,3 electronic config.
2-8-18-32-32-8-2 or (Rn)5f 147s2

"nobelium" Encyclop�dia Britannica Online.

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