![]() ![]() The fictional mineral kryptonite, that weakens Superman and threatens his existence, and the planet Krypton, have probably earned more fans than the chemical ever will. The cryptic name, the element’s glow or just the way it sounds so cool are a number of explanations provided for why the name Krypton was zeroed in for the planet. Superman’s home planet was first referred to forty years after the discovery of krypton, in a comic book published in June 1938. It is used in some form of lighting, dating and also won Ramsay, who was also involved in the discovery of helium, argon, xenon and radon, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1904. The rare nature of this element makes it expensive and hence it has limited usability. This colourless, odourless, rare noble gas does make some compounds, the most common of which is krypton difluoride. It turned out to be apt for it is literally hidden in the earth’s atmosphere, comprising one part per million by volume. Since they had to look for the element by removing everything else, Ramsay and Travers gave element number 36 the name krypton, from the Greek word for ‘hidden’, Krypton's planetary system: Krypton was one of seven planets orbiting the star Rao. The light spectrum when analysed showed that it belonged to an element hitherto unknown… a real element had been discovered on that would go on to inspire fiction. Giving Krypton a surface gravity of 20 higher than Earth and a density 20 greater than Earth's (traditionally Krypton's core, instead of being iron/nickel was of heavier metals) gives Krypton a mean radius almost identical to Earth's. The residue was placed in a Plucker tube connected to an induction coil to produce a spectrum with bright yellow and green lines. The researchers, however, overdid the evaporation, leaving only a heavy gas sample behind. Their process involved boiling a sample of liquified air to get rid of the water, nitrogen, oxygen, helium and argon and finding a lighter element that they expected would fill the gap. In that sense, their discovery was in fact an accident. The two Brits believed that a lighter chemical existed to fit the gap left in the Periodic Table between argon and helium. While one set corresponded to krypton the chemical element, the other set referred to the fictitious planet Krypton – from which the comic book superhero Superman hails from.īack in the 19th century, a Scot by the name William Ramsay and his Englishstudent Morris Travers were searching for gases in the helium family. ![]() When I tried searching “krypton” on the Internet, the top ten results almost alternated between two topics. ![]()
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