Lanthanum Facts
Lanthanum Facts
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| Interesting Lanthanum Facts: |
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| Lanthanum was discovered by a Swedish scientist, Carl Gustaf Mosander, in 1839. |
| It wasn't until 1923, though, that a fairly pure sample of the element was produced. |
| Mosander's discovery of lanthanum from the salts of heated cerium nitrate was made possible by the fact that lanthanum is the strongest base of all trivalent lanthanides. |
| It is the first member of the periodic table's lanthanides series. |
| Despite its being a member of the rare earth metals—so named due to their comparative abundance to the more common metals—lanthanum is a fairly abundant element. |
| It is concentrated at about thirty-two parts per million in the Earth's crust. |
| What does contribute to lanthanum being a rare earth metal is the difficulty and expense of mining the substance from its two primary ores, monazite and bastnasite. |
| Due to its readily oxidizing characteristic, pure lanthanum is only used for research purposes. |
| It is highly malleable and can easily be cut with a knife. |
| There are thirty-eight known isotopes of lanthanum, but only two are believed to occur in nature. |
| Of those two naturally occurring isotopes, La-139 is stable and La-138 is radioactive. |
| The two most stable radioisotopes of lanthanum have half-lives of more than 60,000 years, with La-138 having a half-life of 105,000,000,000 years. |
| Lanthanum's remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than twenty-four hours and most of those having half-lives of less than one minute. |
| In the late 1800s, lanthanum was used to produce glowing mantles in commercial lanterns, and the proprietary mixture of chemicals gave off a green light. |
| Lanthanum has been used in a variety of applications since its discovery, including vacuum tubes, hydrogen alloys, medications, and molecular biology. |
| Today, lanthanum is used as a component of nickel-metal hydride batteries, whose most important commercial use is in hybrid cars. |
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