40 Fun Facts About Yttrium

Among edible plants, which leafy vegetable has been found to hold the largest amount of yttrium?

Cabbage tops the edible list, though the seeds of woody plants hold far more, as much as 700 parts per million.

Yttrium compounds doped with europium long supplied the red glow in the screens of which household device?

Television sets used europium for the red itself, while the yttrium host soaked up energy from the electron gun and passed it along.

A cerium-doped yttrium phosphor is the key ingredient in LEDs that give off which color of light?

White LEDs pair a glowing chip with the phosphor, which gives off yellow light that blends with the chip's own.

A 1987 yttrium compound was the first superconductor to work above the boiling point of which liquefied gas?

Nitrogen boils at 77 K and the compound superconducts at about 93 K, so a cheap coolant could replace costly liquid helium.

Yttrium oxide keeps the crystals stable in which diamond look-alike widely sold in jewelry?

Cubic zirconia only keeps its cubic crystal form at ordinary temperatures with a stabilizer, typically an oxide of yttrium or calcium.

Yttrium metal turns up in which small component of some high-performance car engines?

Spark plugs built for high performance can carry yttrium on their electrodes, the tips where the spark jumps.

Millions of tiny glass or resin beads carrying yttrium-90 are used to treat tumors in which organ?

Liver tumors have their own feeding blood vessels, so doctors send the radioactive beads straight into those vessels.

Yttrium and three other elements all take their names from Ytterby, a quarry village in which country?

Sweden's Ytterby, on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, is described as the single richest source of element discoveries in the world.

Which country became the top exporter of yttrium-bearing heavy ores after California's Mountain Pass mine closed?

China's Bayan Obo district in Inner Mongolia holds the world's largest known deposit of this family of metals.

Yttrium, a soft silvery element in group 3, belongs to which broad class of the periodic table?

Transition metals fill the table's central block, and yttrium is the very first of them in the fifth period.

Yttrium is grouped with the fifteen lanthanides and one lighter metal in which family of seventeen elements?

Rare earths are not actually scarce: cerium, the most plentiful of them, is more common in Earth's crust than copper.

Solid yttrium is stable in air, but what can fine shavings of the metal do above 400 °C?

Catch fire they can, even though a solid lump is protected from the air by a thin oxide film that forms on its surface.

In the laser crystal YAG, Y stands for yttrium and A for aluminum; which mineral name does G stand for?

Garnet names the crystal structure: YAG is a synthetic one, hard enough to have been cut as a simulated diamond.

Which element sits directly above yttrium in group 3 of the periodic table?

Scandium is the lighter twin, yet yttrium behaves far more like the lanthanides than like its upstairs neighbor.

Most of the Solar System's yttrium was forged by slow neutron capture inside which kind of aging star?

Red giants made roughly 72% of it, and the rest came from rapid neutron capture in far more violent cosmic events.

In the glowing mantles of camping lanterns, yttrium took the place of which radioactive element?

Thorium made mantles glow brightly but is radioactive, so lantern maker Coleman switched to yttrium.

Which Finnish chemist first identified yttrium's oxide in a black rock from Ytterby, analyzed in 1794?

Johan Gadolin found that about 38% of the rock was an unknown 'earth', and the element gadolinium was later named in his honor.

The Ytterby mine that yielded yttrium was dug for feldspar, a raw material for which industry?

Porcelain makers bought the feldspar, some of it traded to Britain and Poland, while the mine's quartz went to ironworks.

Carl Axel Arrhenius, who found the heavy black rock that held yttrium, earned his living as what?

Army lieutenant Arrhenius caught the chemistry bug while learning to test gunpowder at the Royal Mint, and minerals became his hobby.

Which German chemist, also famed for making urea in the lab, first isolated yttrium metal in 1828?

Friedrich Wöhler had a remarkable 1828: he also isolated beryllium that year, a feat Antoine Bussy matched independently in France.

The radioactive yttrium used in medicine is harvested from the decay of which long-lived isotope in nuclear fallout?

Strontium-90 has a half-life of nearly 29 years, so a stock of it keeps yielding fresh medical yttrium, which lasts only days.

Yttrium-90 destroys nearby cancer cells in targeted therapies by emitting which type of radiation?

Beta particles do the work: the isotope is attached to antibodies that bind to cancer cells and deliver the dose on the spot.

Yttrium-based YAG lasers routinely clear the cloudy film that can follow which common eye operation?

Cataract surgery can be followed by a clouding of the capsule left behind in the eye, and the same lasers also treat certain kinds of glaucoma.

Which element completes the famous 1987 superconductor made of yttrium, copper and oxygen?

Barium rounds out the compound nicknamed YBCO or '1-2-3', after its ratio of one yttrium atom to two of barium and three of copper.

Yttrium is added to strengthen alloys of aluminum and which other lightweight metal?

Magnesium alloys gain strength from yttrium, which also helps alloys resist oxidation at high temperatures.

Until the early 1920s, which two-letter chemical symbol was used for yttrium instead of today's Y?

Yt gave way to the single letter Y, which leaves yttrium as the only element whose symbol is that letter on its own.

Injections of yttrium-90 are used to calm inflamed joints in rheumatoid arthritis, especially which joints?

Knees are the main target of the procedure, known as radionuclide synovectomy, which treats the joint with radiation from the inside.

Deep-sea mud rich in yttrium was reported in 2018 near Marcus Island, a remote Pacific outpost of which country?

Japan's find, near the island it calls Minami-Torishima, was estimated to hold more than 16 million tons of sought-after metals.

Carl Axel Arrhenius first thought the black rock that yielded yttrium held which newly discovered heavy metal?

Tungsten was his hunch, so he sent samples to various chemists, and their analysis turned up something entirely new.

Which of these elements, like yttrium, takes its name from the quarry village of Ytterby?

Terbium, erbium and ytterbium all share the honor, while holmium and thulium were merely first discovered in the same quarry's rock.

Which chemist showed in 1843 that yttria, long thought a single oxide of yttrium, was really three?

Carl Gustaf Mosander, a pharmacist turned professor, had earlier found lanthanum hiding in another supposedly pure oxide.

Which phosphate mineral, a major source of the heavier lanthanides, is made mostly of yttrium phosphate?

Xenotime got its name as a jab meaning 'vain honor', after a chemist wrongly claimed to have found a new element in it.

Needles made of yttrium-90 have been used to sever pain-carrying nerves in which part of the body?

Spinal cord procedures of this kind relied on the needles cutting more precisely than a scalpel can.

Crystals of yttrium and iron oxide known as YIG make very effective filters for which kind of radiation?

Microwaves are what YIG filters sort, and the same crystals are also very efficient at transmitting acoustic energy.

The first working yttrium-based YAG laser was demonstrated in 1964 at which American research center?

Bell Labs researcher Joseph Geusic led the work, and the crystal's beam is invisible infrared light at a wavelength of 1064 nm.

From 1953, the closed Ytterby mine that gave the world yttrium was used to store what?

Jet fuel sat in the old mine until 1978, but the storage contaminated it and caused problems in the engines that burned it.

In an Nd:YAG laser, the yttrium-based crystal is doped with which element, whose symbol is Nd?

Neodymium ions do the lasing, standing in for about 1% of the yttrium ions in the crystal because the two are of similar size.

Yttrium metal was first isolated in 1828 by heating its chloride with which other metal?

Potassium stripped the chlorine away, the same trick the chemist had used on aluminum chloride the year before.

The yttrium-based pigment YInMn was discovered in 2009 in a chemistry lab at which American university?

Oregon State chemist Mas Subramanian and graduate student Andrew Smith made the find, which later inspired a new Crayola crayon.

Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, the chemist who named yttrium's oxide yttria, went on to discover which element in 1802?

Tantalum was found by Ekeberg even though he was deaf and had been blinded in one eye by a gas explosion.