Helium Trivia
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50 free Helium trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This helium trivia quiz covers the second-lightest element and the only one first spotted on the Sun before anyone found it on Earth. The easy questions handle the basics: its symbol and atomic number, the family of gases it belongs to, why it lifts balloons, why it makes voices squeaky and why party balloons are actually a small part of its use. The harder end gets into the strange physics and history: the 1868 eclipse observation and Lockyer's naming, Ramsay isolating it from uranium ore in 1895, the Kansas gas well that would not burn, Kamerlingh Onnes liquefying it in 1908, why it never freezes at atmospheric pressure, superfluid helium II and its creeping film, the US National Helium Reserve, why the Hindenburg used hydrogen instead, helium-3 on the Moon and the Large Hadron Collider's 96 tonnes of coolant. Every answer was checked against the element's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our hydrogen, periodic table and chemistry quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is helium's atomic number?
2
2: helium's atoms are so light that the gas floats in air, which is why it fills party balloons, weather balloons and airships.
Q 02Helium takes its name from the Greek word for what?
The Sun
The Sun, helios in Greek, gave helium its name because astronomers saw the element's yellow line in sunlight in 1868, decades before anyone found it on Earth.
Q 03To which group of the periodic table does helium belong?
The noble gases
The noble gases are helium's family, and it is so unreactive that chemists have never made an ordinary stable compound of it.
Q 04By mass, about how much of the universe's ordinary matter is helium?
About 25%
About 25%: almost all of that helium was made in the Big Bang itself, before any star had formed.
Q 05During what event in 1868 was helium's yellow spectral line first detected?
A total solar eclipse
A total solar eclipse over India let French astronomer Jules Janssen record a bright yellow line that was at first taken for sodium.
Q 06Which English astronomer named helium after spotting its yellow line in 1868?
Norman Lockyer
Norman Lockyer found the yellow line matched no known element and proposed a new one, 27 years before anyone held a sample of it on Earth.
Q 07Helium was first reported on Earth in material from which Italian volcano?
Mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius: physicist Luigi Palmieri was analysing what the erupting volcano gave off when he spotted helium's yellow spectral line, more than a decade before anyone isolated the gas.
Q 08Which Scottish chemist isolated helium on Earth in 1895 by treating the mineral cleveite with acids?
William Ramsay
William Ramsay was hunting for argon in minerals when cleveite gave off a gas whose spectrum matched the yellow line astronomers had logged 27 years before.
Q 09Aging stars fuse three helium nuclei together to make which element?
Carbon
Carbon forms when three helium nuclei fuse in an aging star's core, and that process is the main origin of the carbon in our bodies.
Q 10Which pair proved alpha particles are helium nuclei by trapping them in a glass tube?
Ernest Rutherford and Thomas Royds
Ernest Rutherford and Thomas Royds let alpha particles pass through a thin glass wall into a sealed tube, then sparked the trapped gas and saw helium's spectrum.
Q 11Who first liquefied helium, in 1908?
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes used his new liquid helium three years later to chill mercury, and watched its electrical resistance vanish: the discovery of superconductivity.
Q 12What is unique about helium at atmospheric pressure as it approaches absolute zero?
It stays liquid and never freezes
It stays liquid and never freezes because its light atoms keep jiggling even near absolute zero; only squeezing it to about 25 atmospheres will make it solid.
Q 13Helium boils at about 4 degrees on which temperature scale?
Kelvin
Q 21Hospitals rely on liquid helium to cool which machines?
MRI scanners
MRI scanners use superconducting magnets, which carry their huge currents only when bathed in liquid helium a few degrees above absolute zero.
Q 22Which giant machine uses superfluid helium to keep its magnets colder than outer space?
The Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider chills its magnets to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space at 2.7, because helium turns superfluid down there and becomes a far better coolant.
Q 23Why does Earth's air hold barely any helium, the universe's second most common element?
It escapes into space
Kelvin counts up from absolute zero, and helium boils barely 4 degrees above it, lower than any other element, which is why it chills superconducting magnets.
Q 14Who discovered that liquid helium loses almost all viscosity near absolute zero, now called superfluidity?
Pyotr Kapitsa
Pyotr Kapitsa watched chilled liquid helium slip through the narrowest gaps with no measurable friction, a finding that earned him a share of the 1978 physics Nobel.
Q 15What name do physicists give the superfluid phase of liquid helium?
Helium II
Helium II appears when ordinary liquid helium, called helium I, is chilled past the 'lambda point', so named because a graph of the transition traces the Greek letter lambda.
Q 16Left in an open cup, superfluid helium does what that no ordinary liquid can?
Climbs the walls and escapes
Climbs the walls and escapes: with no friction to hold it back, a thin film of superfluid helium creeps up the sides and over the rim, against gravity.
Q 17In superfluid helium, the wave that physicists call 'second sound' carries what?
Heat
Heat normally seeps slowly through a material, but in superfluid helium it travels as a wave, much as sound does, which is how second sound got its name.
Q 18Why does inhaling helium make a voice go squeaky?
Sound travels faster through it
Sound travels faster through it, so the throat's resonances shift upward, yet the vocal cords keep vibrating at their usual pitch.
Q 19Inhaling which dense gas produces the opposite effect to helium, deepening the voice?
Sulfur hexafluoride
Sulfur hexafluoride is about five times as dense as air, so it lowers the throat's resonances and the voice drops.
Q 20What is the main danger of inhaling too much helium?
Asphyxiation, since it displaces oxygen
Asphyxiation, since it displaces oxygen, is the risk, and a pressurised cylinder adds another: the blast of gas can tear lung tissue, so never inhale from one.
It escapes into space: helium is so light that Earth's gravity cannot hold on to it, so every balloonful released is gone for good.
Q 24Most of the helium on Earth is created by what process?
Radioactive decay of uranium and thorium
Radioactive decay of uranium and thorium fires out alpha particles, and each one grabs two electrons from the surrounding rock to become a helium atom.
Q 25From what source is commercial helium extracted?
Natural gas
Natural gas from a new Kansas well refused to catch fire in 1903, and chemists later found helium in it; gas fields have supplied the world ever since.
Q 26Google's Project Loon floated helium balloons in the stratosphere to beam down what?
Internet access
Internet access: the balloons drifted on the wind, and Loon steered each one by raising or lowering it into a layer blowing the right way.
Q 27Where did the US government set up the National Helium Reserve in 1925?
Amarillo, Texas
Amarillo, Texas, sits beside a natural underground rock dome that could hold the gas, which the government first stockpiled to fill military airships.
Q 28Why did the Hindenburg fly on flammable hydrogen rather than helium?
A US law banned helium exports
A US law banned helium exports and America was the only producer, so the Hindenburg, designed for helium, had to be filled with hydrogen.
Q 29Compared with hydrogen, what is helium's drawback in an airship?
It lifts less weight
It lifts less weight than hydrogen does, yet after the airship Roma burned in 1922 American airships never flew on hydrogen again.
Q 30As of 2024, which small Gulf state supplied about a third of the world's helium?
Qatar
Qatar's share is so large that when its neighbours cut off its trade routes in 2017, buyers around the world braced for helium shortages.