Hassium

Hassium is the superheavy element with atomic number 108, first synthesized in 1984 by a GSI team in Darmstadt, Germany, that bombarded a lead target with iron ions; it is named after the German state of Hesse. All of its isotopes have half-lives on the millisecond-to-second scale, it does not occur in nature, and only a few atoms can be produced at a time. It has no practical uses and serves only in research on the nuclear physics and chemistry of superheavy elements.

Hassium oxides such as hassium tetroxide (HsO4) have only been briefly detected in single-atom gas-phase experiments, to judge whether it behaves like ruthenium and osmium; they have never been prepared or weighed in macroscopic quantities and have no civilian or industrial application.