An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

An artificially produced radioactive chemical element; symbol Rf. Atomic number 104; mass number of most stable isotope 261; melting point, boiling point, and specific gravity unknown. Rutherfordium was discovered in 1964 by a team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna in Russia who named the element kurchatovium. The Russian scientists were unable to duplicate their results and therefore lost credit to a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who identified the element. The scientists in California were successful in isolating the element after irradiating ²⁴⁹Cf with ¹²C.

See also: Named after the British physicist and chemist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), → Rutherford atom.