40 Fun Facts About Xenon

In 1989, scientists arranged 35 individual xenon atoms on a metal surface to spell the name of which company?

IBM researcher Don Eigler nudged the atoms into place one at a time on a chilled nickel crystal. It was the first time anyone had precisely positioned single atoms on a flat surface.

Helium turns a voice squeaky, but what does breathing in dense xenon gas do to a person's voice?

Xenon makes it deeper because sound crawls through the heavy gas at just 169 metres per second. Many universities have banned the stunt, since xenon is costly and can starve the body of oxygen.

Xenon was the development codename of which Microsoft games console, released in 2005?

Xbox 360 planning began in 2003 under the Xenon name. The label stuck to the hardware as well: the three-core processor inside the console is also called Xenon.

In 2025, four British climbers inhaled xenon before scaling which mountain on a trip lasting about a week?

Mount Everest normally demands several weeks of acclimatisation, which the team said the gas let them skip. Mountaineering's world federation replied that no evidence shows xenon helps at altitude.

A build-up of neutron-absorbing xenon-135 in the reactor core contributed to which nuclear power plant disaster?

Chernobyl's reactor was throttled back for a safety test, and xenon-135 dragged its power to near-shutdown levels. Operators withdrew nearly all the control rods to recover, leaving the core unstable.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which orbited both Vesta and Ceres, used xenon as the propellant in which kind of engine?

Ion thruster engines give xenon atoms an electric charge and fling them out up to ten times faster than chemical rocket exhaust. Dawn's push was gentle, but it used only about 3 milligrams of xenon a second.

Xenon, a rare gas discovered in 1898, takes its name from a Greek word with which meaning?

Stranger is the meaning of the Greek word xenos. The discoverers first wanted to name the gas after the colour of its glow, but chemists had already used up every suitable Greek and Latin root.

Research into why deep-sea divers felt drunk led a US Navy doctor to deduce that xenon could work as what?

An anesthetic is what xenon proved to be: in 1951 it put two surgical patients under for the first time. It remains a rarity in operating theatres because the gas costs far more than standard drugs.

Tanks holding tonnes of liquid xenon deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountain are built to detect what?

Dark matter particles should, in theory, occasionally strike a xenon nucleus and set off a faint flash of light. Liquid xenon is dense enough to offer plenty of targets and to shield its own core from stray radiation.

Xenon sits in group 18 of the periodic table, a family of elements known by which name?

Noble gases take the name from the German Edelgas, coined in 1900 to mark how little they react. Xenon broke the rule in 1962, becoming the first of the family to be forced into a chemical compound.

Inside a gas-discharge tube, xenon gives off a glow of which colour when electricity passes through it?

Blue wins out because xenon's most intense emission lines fall in that part of the spectrum. Its fainter lines span every visible colour, which is why high-pressure xenon lamps shine white.

Which cinema format's dome projectors have used single xenon lamps rated as high as 15 kilowatts?

IMAX bulbs hold xenon at about 25 atmospheres, so projectionists wear protective body armour when handling one in case it shatters. Each lamp lasts roughly 1,000 hours and needs its own water cooler.

The first working laser, built in 1960, used a coiled xenon flash lamp to energise a crystal of which gemstone?

Ruby was a material rival laser builders had written off, but Theodore Maiman trusted his own analysis. A General Electric salesman supplied the xenon lamps, boasting the largest could set steel wool alight.

Each tiny cell of which flat-screen television technology, popular in the 2000s, held a mixture of xenon and neon?

Plasma display cells ionise the gas so that it gives off ultraviolet light, which in turn makes a phosphor coating glow. Each pixel works like a microscopic fluorescent lamp.

Traces of radioactive xenon detected in the air over Canada in 2006 confirmed a nuclear test by which country?

North Korea had set off its first device underground, but xenon gas seeps out through rock. Two weeks later a monitoring station picked it up, and analysts tracked the air back to its source.

Which Scottish chemist discovered xenon with Morris Travers and went on to win the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

William Ramsay was honoured for uncovering a whole new column of the periodic table. Besides xenon, he had a hand in isolating argon, helium, neon and krypton.

Xenon was first found in 1898 in the residue left behind after slowly evaporating what?

Liquefied air handed the same two chemists three new elements within weeks in 1898: krypton first, then neon, and finally xenon.

In which British city was xenon discovered in 1898, at the college where its finder held the chair of chemistry?

London's University College was the scene. Chemists there isolated five of the naturally occurring gases in xenon's group of the periodic table.

Which chemist made the first xenon compound in 1962, overturning the belief that such gases never react?

Neil Bartlett had noticed that xenon gives up an electron about as easily as oxygen does, so he tried on it a reaction that already worked for oxygen. A mustard-yellow solid formed.

Which American chemist, famous for his work on chemical bonds, predicted in 1933 that xenon could form compounds?

Linus Pauling made the call almost thirty years before anyone succeeded, then changed his mind: in 1961 he declared xenon completely unreactive. The first compound appeared the very next year.

The first xenon compound, made in 1962, was a salt containing fluorine and which precious metal?

Platinum hexafluoride, a deep-red vapour, met colourless xenon and at once left a yellow solid. Later work showed the product was probably a mixture of several xenon salts, not one pure compound.

Chemists have made a complex in which four xenon atoms bond to a single atom of which famously unreactive metal?

Gold sits at the centre of the complex in a rare +2 state, ringed by four xenon atoms. Two elements known for refusing to react end up bonded directly to each other.

Xenon lamps took over cinema projection from the 1950s, replacing which older, more labour-intensive light source?

Carbon arcs were shorter-lived and took more work to run. Germany's Osram put the xenon replacement on sale in 1952, two years after its first public film screening in Berlin.

Which instrument did researchers use in 1989 to drag individual xenon atoms into position across a nickel crystal?

Scanning tunneling microscope tips had previously been used only to take atomic-resolution images. This was the first time one served as a tool for moving atoms about.

Which planet's atmosphere holds a puzzlingly high share of xenon, about 2.6 times the proportion found in the Sun?

Jupiter's surplus is still unexplained. One idea is that icy building blocks trapped the gas early on, before the young Sun had warmed the disc of material around it.

Xenon trapped in rock at Oklo shows how natural nuclear reactors ran two billion years ago in which country?

Gabon's ancient reactors switched themselves on and off. The xenon record shows about 30 minutes of fission followed by two and a half hours of cooling, over and over.

Xenon was banned in sport in 2014 over claims that inhaling it boosts the body's output of which hormone?

Erythropoietin, better known as EPO, tells the body to make more red blood cells. The ban came before any reliable test for the gas existed, and studies suggest xenon does not improve performance anyway.

Which MIT engineer, nicknamed Papa Flash, invented the xenon flash lamp and froze a bullet passing through an apple?

Harold Edgerton could fire flashes as brief as a millionth of a second by 1934. He picked up the nickname while building underwater camera gear for Jacques Cousteau.

Doctors can image a patient's lungs by having them inhale hyperpolarized xenon-129 inside which kind of machine?

MRI scanner images pick up the xenon after its nuclei have been lined up in advance using polarised light. Unlike radioactive xenon-133, this form exposes the patient to no ionising radiation.

Xenon-135 unexpectedly shut down the first large-scale nuclear reactor in 1944 at which Manhattan Project site?

Hanford's B Reactor shut itself down, then restarted unaided about 15 hours later. Physicist John Wheeler suspected a short-lived fission product that soaks up neutrons, and he was right.

Which element, known for its violet vapour, sits immediately before xenon in the periodic table?

Iodine and xenon are linked by more than position. Several radioactive forms of iodine decay straight into xenon, which is how much of the xenon inside a nuclear reactor comes about.

Which radioactive element sits directly below xenon in group 18 of the periodic table?

Radon is the next step down the column and the last member found in nature. That leaves xenon as the heaviest element in the group that is not radioactive.

Ordinary fusion inside stars cannot make xenon, so much of it is forged during which violent events?

Supernovae supply the flood of neutrons needed to build atoms this heavy. Stars cannot do it by fusion, because making anything heavier than iron uses up energy instead of releasing it.

Natural xenon hydrates are thought to occur in Lake Vostok, which lies sealed under thick ice in which region?

Antarctica's Lake Vostok lies beneath a Russian research station, hence the name. In a xenon hydrate, water molecules freeze into cages around the atoms, and the lake's crushing pressure keeps them stable.

Xenon difluoride vapour is used to etch away which element when building the microscopic machines known as MEMS?

Silicon is eaten away evenly in every direction, and the reaction needs no outside energy to drive it. The technique was first demonstrated in 1995.

The LUX-ZEPLIN detector holds seven tonnes of liquid xenon about a mile underground in which US state?

South Dakota's rock has a job to do: the mile of it overhead blocks most of the cosmic-ray particles that would otherwise swamp such a sensitive instrument.

Physicist John Reynolds found a telltale excess of xenon-129 in which objects, a clue to the Solar System's birth?

Meteorites held extra xenon-129, the decay product of a radioactive isotope that lasts only a few tens of millions of years. So the rocks must have hardened soon after their atoms were made.

Which carmaker's flagship saloon was the first production car offered with xenon headlights, in the early 1990s?

BMW offered them as an option on its 7 Series. So-called xenon headlights are really metal-halide lamps: the xenon is there to give light instantly while the rest of the bulb warms up.

Europe's SMART-1 probe used a xenon-fuelled engine to spiral slowly outward from Earth orbit to which destination?

Moon orbit took SMART-1 thirteen months of gentle spiralling to reach. Its xenon engine was more than three times as fuel-efficient as the best chemical rockets.

Xenon's oxides, xenon trioxide and xenon tetroxide, are both feared in the laboratory for being dangerously what?

Explosive is the word: xenon tetroxide, a pale-yellow solid, blows apart into xenon and oxygen above about −36 °C. It has to be chilled quickly as soon as it forms.