Neon

Neon is one of the world’s rare and most expensive elements. I chose Neon because of it's uniqueness. In 1898, William Ramsay and Morris Travers at University College London isolated krypton gas by evaporating liquid argon. They had been expecting to find a lighter gas which would fit a niche above argon in the periodic table of the elements. They then repeated their experiment, that time allowing solid argon to evaporate at a slow pace under reduced pressure and collected the gas which came off first. This time they were quite successful, and when they put a sample of the new gas into their atomic spectrometer it scared them by the brilliant red glow that we now associate with neon signs. Ramsay named the new gas neon, basing it on neos, the …show more content…
However, it is present in the Earth’s atmosphere at a concentration of just 18 parts per million. It is extracted by fractional distillation of liquid air. This gives a fraction that contains both helium and neon. The helium is removed from the mixture with activated charcoal. Neon is considered a non metal. Neon is widely distributed in the entire Universe. The thermonuclear reactions between carbon and oxygen, that occur in the stars cores and are responsible for its high temperatures, can eventually create neon. Some of these stars explode, originating novas and supernovas, releasing huge amounts of gas, responsible for the existence of neon in clouds of interstellar gas. At room temperature, neon's state of matter is gas. It is a very rare, inert gaseous element that is found in the noble gases section in group 18 of the periodic table. Neons melting point is -249 degrees C. Neon is also colorless. Neon glows when a high electrical voltage is passed through it. Air is one of the only real sources of neon. In the process of separation by low-temperature rectification most volatile components move into the first isolated part. It is collected from under the cover of the air-fractionating