Darmstadtium
. Darmstadtium, symbol Ds, chemical element with atomic number 110. It is produced artificially by nuclear fusion (in which an element with larger atoms is produced by fusing together smaller atoms from other elements). Each darmstadtium atom has a very large nucleus, or central mass, containing positively charged particles called protons and neutral particles called neutrons . The large number of particles in the nucleus makes the atom unstable and causes the atom to split apart into smaller components soon after it is created. Darmstadtium was first discovered in 1994 by scientists at the Heavy-Ion Research Laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany. The scientists named darmstadtium after the place of its discovery. Darmstadtium has the atomic number 110, which means that each Ds atom contains 110 protons in the nucleus. Scientists have created a number of isotopes of darmstadtium. Isotopes are forms of the element that contain different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. For example, Ds-