Helium

by hadi jawarish

Artwork: Hadi Jawarish

Joined Nov 2022
Published Books 1

Helium; The image is of the sun because helium gets its name from ‘helios’, the Greek word for the sun. Helium was detected in the sun by its spectral lines many years before it was found on Earth.

Helium Element - Visual Elements Periodic Table

Discovery date	1895
Discovered by	Sir William Ramsay in London, and independently by Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet in Uppsala, Sweden
Origin of the name	The name is derived from the Greek, ‘helios’ meaning sun, as it was in the sun’s corona that helium was first detected.

Fact box

Group	18	Melting point	Unknown
Period	1	Boiling point	−268.928°C, −452.07°F, 4.222 K
Block	s	Density (g cm⁻³)	0.000164
Atomic number	2	Relative atomic mass	4.003
State at 20°C	Gas	Key isotopes	⁴He
Electron configuration	1s²	CAS number	7440-59-7

Uses

Helium is used as a cooling medium for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and the superconducting magnets in MRI scanners and NMR spectrometers. It is also used to keep satellite instruments cool and was used to cool the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that powered the Apollo space vehicles.

Because of its low density helium is often used to fill decorative balloons, weather balloons and airships. Hydrogen was once used to fill balloons but it is dangerously reactive.

Because it is very unreactive, helium is used to provide an inert protective atmosphere for making fibre optics and semiconductors, and for arc welding. Helium is also used to detect leaks, such as in car air-conditioning systems, and because it diffuses quickly it is used to inflate car airbags after impact.

A mixture of 80% helium and 20% oxygen is used as an artificial atmosphere for deep-sea divers and others working under pressurised conditions.

Helium-neon gas lasers are used to scan barcodes in supermarket checkouts. A new use for helium is a helium-ion microscope that gives better image resolution than a scanning electron microscope.

Biological role

Helium has no known biological role. It is non-toxic.

Natural abundance

After hydrogen, helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. It is present in all stars. It was, and is still being, formed from alpha-particle decay of radioactive elements in the Earth. Some of the helium formed escapes into the atmosphere, which contains about 5 parts per million by volume. This is a dynamic balance, with the low-density helium continually escaping to outer space.

It is uneconomical to extract helium from the air. The major source is natural gas, which can contain up to 7% helium.

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