Periodic table officially expands to make way for four brand new elements

All the new additions are synthesised in labratories

Kosuke Morita (L), who led the team at Riken institute that discovered the superheavy synthetic element, and Hiroshi Hase (R), Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, pose with a board displaying the new element 113 during at a press conference at Riken's research center in Wako, Saitama prefecture on June 9, 2016 (JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images)

The periodic table is now just a little bit bigger.

Perhaps the most fundamental chart in all of science officially has four extra elements listed. The new elements have now been given official names and will be included in the grid.

The four new elements include nihonium, the first ever to be found by Japanese scientists.

That element – which until recently was referred to to as 113 – got its proper name from the word for Japan in Japanese – 'nihon', literally 'the land of the rising sun'.

"The element, named for the first time by Japanese and in Asia, will occupy a place in the periodic table - an intellectual asset of mankind," Kosuke Morita, who led the team that created the element, said in a statement.

Two of the other three new elements take their name from a place. The other gets its from a pioneering scientist.

The periodic table, pored over by science students the world over, arranges chemical elements in the order of their atomic number.

Some elements, such as hydrogen, carbon or magnesium, are found in nature while others, including nihonium - official symbol Nh - are synthesised in laboratories.

All the discovered elements after 104 are synthetic ones produced through laboratory experiments.

Tradition dictates that newly discovered elements be named after a place, geographical region, or scientist, according to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which made the announcement on the names Wednesday.

A joint team of Russian and US scientists named element 115 moscovium - symbol Mc - after the Russian capital, where much of the relevant research was conducted.

For similar reasons, they also named element 117 tennessine - symbol Ts - after the US state of Tennessee.

The third one they discovered, element 118, was named oganesson - symbol Og - in homage to Russian nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian, in recognition of his "pioneering contributions" in elements research.

North Carolina-based IUPAC said that the names were officially accepted after a 5-month public review period.

"The names of the new elements reflect the realities of our present time," IUPAC president Natalia Tarasova said on its website, citing the "universality of science" as well as "the pivotal role" of Oganessian.

With the latest discoveries, the periodic table is now complete down to the seventh row.

Underscoring the importance of the discoveries, the scientists behind the four new elements had been seen as strong candidates for this year's Nobel Chemistry Prize.

Japan has a proud research tradition and its citizens have won about 20 Nobel prizes in science and medicine, including Yoshinori Ohsumi who won the Nobel Medicine Prize this year.

Additional reporting by AFP