

However, this chemical also has a number of other applications in the everyday life: The most prominent and popular use of neon is in the bright, neon signs. The production of neon is a relatively expensive process – both the liquid neon and the neon gas can be priced 55 times more than the liquid helium. For commercial purposes, neon is primarily obtained from the liquefying air. Rarely found in the Earth’s atmosphere, neon can occur in diamonds and some volcanic vents. Near the end of these stars, they enter the carbon burning phase and form neon, oxygen, magnesium, and sodium. This process refers to the internal pressure of the large mass stars that triggered the fusion of the carbon atoms into neon atoms. In the Universe, element 10 was formed by the alpha process in stars. Neon is both a rare and abundant substance.

Since the chemical behavior of the inert gas they successfully isolated from an argon sample was rather new for Ramsay and Travers, the scientists decided to name their new element “neon”, thus borrowing the Greek term denoting “the new gas”. The name of this chemical element comes from the Greek word ‘νέον’ (neon) with its literal translation being ‘“new”. In 1904, Sir William Ramsay was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of his great achievement and discovery of the inert gaseous elements in the air. Ramsay was firmly convinced that this is the element that would fit into the predicted position in the periodic table, which was located between the elements helium and argon. Especially after krypton had been removed from the residue, there was a gaseous substance that gave a brilliant red light detected by the method of spectroscopy. For this reason, these two scientists attempted to freeze the argon sample by using liquid air.Īfter gases ( nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and krypton) evaporated, the residue turned out to be an undefined gaseous substance that emitted a bright crimson glow when ionized. After having successfully isolated the elements argon and helium, the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay (1852 – 1916) and his English fellow Morris Travers (1872 – 1961) made an effort to achieve a new scientific discovery at the University College of London.Īs an experienced chemist, Ramsey was aware of the fact that a chemical element may often hide a new, undiscovered substance within its structure. The story of neon’s discovery begins in 1898. Sharing the properties of its family of the periodic table, neon is also an excellent conductor of electricity which exhibits the most prominent characteristic of this chemical element – the colorful glow.
NEON NUMBER ON PERIODIC TABLE FULL
These chemical elements are not only the most stable substances in the periodic table but also the least reactive ones because they all have a full outer valence shell. It is classified in the group of noble gasses, together with helium, argon, krypton, and xenon. Neon is a rare gas with a closely packed cubic structure composed of molecules that contain a single atom of this chemical element. This rare monoatomic atmospheric gas has an unknown electronegativity according to Pauling, while the atomic radius of neon according to van der Waals is 0.16 nm. With the periodic table symbol 10, atomic number 10, atomic mass of 20.179 g.mol-1, and electron configuration 2s22p6, neon is a chemically inert, colorless, odorless, diamagnetic, and non-toxic gas.
