Helium - the least active element in the universe

Chinese name: 氦

Element symbol: He

English name: Helium

        When people fly balloons filled with helium to fly their dreams, they do not know that a part of the non-renewable precious resources on the earth has disappeared forever. Although helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, it is a very poor, non-renewable and valuable resource for Earth. Let's start with the discovery of helium:

        On August 18, 1868, French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen visited Guntur in the British Indian state of Madras (now in Andhra Pradesh) to observe a total solar eclipse and found a bright yellow chromatographic line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm with his spectrometer. Jeansen was worried that there was something wrong with the instrument, so he performed spectroscopic analysis of the prominence again, and the observations were the same as before. He wrote to the French Academy of Sciences about his findings. The letter did not reach Paris until October because of traffic constraints.

        On the same day that Pierre Jansen's letter arrived at the French Academy of Sciences, so did a letter from the English astronomer Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer. On October 20 of the same year, Lockyer discovered the same yellow line while analyzing the solar spectrum in London, and named it "D3". The French astronomer Pierre Jansen and the English astronomer Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer are credited with the discovery of helium. This is the first time a new element has been discovered from an alien body that has not yet been discovered on Earth. The English astronomer Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer and the English chemist Sir Edward Frankland named this element Helium, after the Greek word ἥλιος (helios, meaning "sun").

        On August 18, 1868, French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen visited Guntur in the British Indian state of Madras (now in Andhra Pradesh) to observe a total solar eclipse and found a bright yellow chromatographic line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm with his spectrometer. Jeansen was worried that there was something wrong with the instrument, so he performed spectroscopic analysis of the prominence again, and the observations were the same as before. He wrote to the French Academy of Sciences about his findings. The letter did not reach Paris until October because of traffic constraints.

        In 1881, Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri discovered the D3 line of helium while analyzing magma from Mount Vesuvius, the first recorded discovery of helium on Earth. But it wasn't until March 26, 1895, that the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay (the great chemist will mention many times in future noble gases) treated yttrium uranite (a pitchblenite containing 10% of its mass rare earth elements) with acid to isolate helium for the first time on Earth.

       On August 18, 1868, French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen visited Guntur in the British Indian state of Madras (now in Andhra Pradesh) to observe a total solar eclipse and found a bright yellow chromatographic line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm with his spectrometer. Jeansen was worried that there was something wrong with the instrument, so he performed spectroscopic analysis of the prominence again, and the observations were the same as before. He wrote to the French Academy of Sciences about his findings. The letter did not reach Paris until October because of traffic constraints.

Why do people always think that there is no helium on Earth?

Why did it take nearly 30 years after its discovery to isolate helium?

        First of all, the helium element on the earth is mainly in the form of elemental helium, which is an inert gas and is very stable without stable compounds. Second, helium nuclei are too light to be attracted by the Earth's gravity, and once helium enters the atmosphere, it floats away into space. Third, helium has a very low solubility and is almost insoluble in water. So the way humans get helium is by mining it locked up in the Earth's crust, which is mostly released by radioactive decay.

Helium is very important to us and has many applications:

1, low temperature cooling: the boiling point of helium is 4.2 Kelvin, which is minus 268 degrees Celsius, very close to absolute zero. Ultra-low temperature cooling technology has a wide range of applications in fields such as superconductivity technology, and plays an important role in frontier physics research, magnetic resonance imaging technology (MRI), nuclear magnetic resonance technology (NMR) and other fields. Helium is the only substance that has these properties that we can use .

2, protective gas and inspection analysis: helium is an inert gas, non-toxic and non-radiation, can do protective gas and inspection analysis. Helium gas is often used in magnesium, zirconium, aluminum, titanium and other metal welding protection gas; Helium is also used in vacuum leak detection, an important component of helium mass spectrometry leak detection.

3, balloon filling: the density of helium is 0.1786kg per cubic meter, far less than the density of air 1.29kg per cubic meter, and the chemical properties are very active, much safer than hydrogen (Hindenburg hydrogen airship explosion), so it is often used as a spaceship or balloon filling gas.

4, helium-oxygen mixture for diving: due to the huge water pressure during diving, nitrogen in the normal air will be pressed into the blood, resulting in the occurrence of "drunk nitrogen reaction", which is a very dangerous situation, the human body in the "drunk nitrogen" situation like drunk dizziness, slow reaction, loss of judgment. But a mixture of helium-oxygen gas can effectively prevent this from happening, because helium does not dissolve into human blood under high pressure.

5, superfluid: helium liquefaction when the temperature is reduced to 2.18 Kelvin (about minus 271 degrees Celsius), the properties will change, the viscosity becomes very small, can flow upward along the cup wall, which is a superfluid state, with excellent mobility and thermal conductivity.

        Although helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, it is difficult to preserve on Earth, as evidenced by the history of its discovery and isolation. When we want to fly balloons and dreams again, do we think that once these helium gases enter the atmosphere, they will disappear from the earth forever, will we give up this idea?

All the data in this article are from the Internet, only for the purpose of knowledge promotion