Helium is formed on Earth when radioactive elements decay in the crust to produce charged particles called alpha particles. The helium-4 nucleus is an atom identical to an alpha particle, but has two protons and neutrons bound in the process of alpha decay when the element decays and releases the mass of what is becoming. The nuclei of helium-4 are atoms that are identical to alpha particles, but have two bound proton neutrons that are formed in a process of alpha decay, in which the element decays and releases the mass of what has become.
Helium gas is today used in a wide range of industrial, commercial and recreational applications. Also known as flight, helium is the gas that lights up the air and gives airships and balloons buoyancy. Helium, now used in science and industry, comes from natural gas, a gas discovered in 1905.
Helium is on Earth the product of the radioactive decay of heavy elements that emit helium nuclei known as alpha particles. It occurs in significant quantities in natural gas, where it can be obtained by fractional distillation at low temperature.
In 1868, the French astronomer Pierre Janssen first discovered helium in the light of a solar eclipse as an unknown yellow spectral line signature, one year later the English astronomer Norman Lockyer identified helium as a new element. Decades later, at the outbreak of World War I, the element was discovered in a natural gas deposit in Texas in a zeppelin balloon. No one would have thought that the discovery of helium in natural gas would have much application.
The English chemist William Ramsay isolated Helium particles in 1895 by heating uranium minerals, which led to an inert gas with the same spectral lines Janssen and Lockyer had seen on Earth. In 1895, the chemist William Ramsey discovered helium in gas released by the radioactive mineral uranium when treated with acid.
Helium was first detected on August 1868 when French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovered a bright yellow line with a wavelength of 58.749 nanometres in the chromosphere spectrum around the sun during a total solar eclipse in Guntur, India. It was the English scientist Norman Lockyer who suggested that the mysterious yellow line was evidence of a new element which he and chemist Edward Frankland called helium. Lockyer saw the yellow line and decided to name the previously unknown helium element after the Greek word for sun, Helios, after his observations.
The noble gas Helium was discovered by the French astronomer Jules Janssen on 18 August 1868 in a total solar eclipse 150 years ago. He named it after the source of the newly discovered sun, Helios, when it was first discovered on Earth.
In the universe, helium is the second most common element after hydrogen in cosmology. This element is also the most common element in the universe – discovered in the corona of the Sun and in a gas leak on Vesuvius. Helium is the second most observable element in the entire universe and a rare earth product of radioactive decay of the element uranium.
Helium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe and most of it is located in the Earth’s atmosphere. Earth’s heterosphere is the part of the upper atmosphere where helium and other lighter gases are more abundant than any other element.
The scientists named the hitherto unknown element helium after Helios, the Greek sun god. Lockyer named the proposed new element observed in the sun’s chromosphere helium after the Greek word for sun, helios. Lockyer suggested deriving the name “helium” for the new element from the Greek name for the sun, Helios.
Helium was discovered by the Sun and is also found on Earth, the second most abundant element in the universe. Helium was first discovered by French astronomer Pierre Janssen in 1868 during a total solar eclipse as an unknown yellow line in the solar spectrum. Before the metal helium was discovered on Earth, it was either a metal or a non-reactive gas.
Secondly, helium is the second lightest and most abundant element, occurring in only 2.4% of the elementary mass of the universe. It is also the second least reactive of the noble gases after neon and the second least reactive element. The second lightest element is hydrogen, which is lighter than helium and is a colourless, odorless and tasteless gas that becomes liquid at -45 degrees Celsius.
Scientists have known for some time that the most common elements in the universe are simple gases: hydrogen and helium. Together, they represent the vast majority of the observable mass of the universe, dwarfing all the heavier elements. In production, helium gas is used, which consists of 98.2 percent pure isolated natural gas, which is liquefied at low temperatures and high pressure from other components.
Lockyer was the first to propose helium as a spectral line because of the new element he named. After further analysis by chemists Hamilton Cady and David McFarland, they determined that 184% of the samples of the escaping gas were helium. Now, 150 years after Janssen and Lockyer spotted the bright yellow emission line – the first glimpse of helium – a British research team has identified helium in the atmosphere of exoplanets6. The process used by Lockyer is similar, said Jessica Spake of the University of Exeter who led the research.
Arun Kumar 