preview

Ytterbite Research Paper

Decent Essays
Open Document

Rare Earth Lanthanides are the second bottommost family of elements on the periodic table. They number 57 through 71. “Rare Earth” is actually a misnomer, because all of these elements can be found in nature except one, which we’ll talk about later. There are only 15 Rare Earth Lanthanides, but they can be found in most metals.

The first Rare Earth Lanthanide was ever discovered was in 1792 and was named ytterbite, even though it is not actually a Rare Earth Metal it contained other Rare Earth Lanthanides inside. Johan Gadolin found a new oxide in a metal called ytterbite in 1789, and he wrote about it in 1794. In 1797 Anders Gustaf Ekeberg agreed with that claim. Ytterbite was found to contain a new oxide, and Ekeberg named said oxide yttria. …show more content…

Didymia was impossible to separate any more using Mosander's techniques, because it was a mixture of oxides. So in 1842 the known rare earth elements were: yttrium, cerium, lanthanum, didymium, erbium and terbium.
In 1843 Carl Gustav Mosander found that yttria has three more oxides inside of it. And in 1878 a fourth oxide was found by Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac. The oxides are white yttrium oxide, yellow terbium oxide, rose-colored erbium oxide, and ytterbium oxide. But since yttria was a mineral it was renamed Gadolinite by Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Anders Gustav Ekeberg isolated beryllium from the gadolinite but failed to find any other elements that it …show more content…

He found several new spectral lines in didymia. Spectral radiation is the spectrum of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation sent out from an atom transitioning from a high energy to a low energy state. Also in 1879, the new element samarium was isolated by Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran from the mineral samarskite. Another new element was gadolinium in 1886 by direct isolation from samarskite by Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac. Between 1886 and 1901, Lecoq de Boisbaudran and Eugène-Anatole Demarçay yielded several new spectroscopic lines that showed the existence of an unknown element. The fractional crystallization of the oxides yielded europium in 1901. Fractional crystallization is a method of refining substances based on differences in solubility.
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley used X-ray crystallography and made it possible to assign atomic numbers to the elements. X-ray crystallography is a tool used for identifying the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the atoms cause a beam of X-rays to reflect into many different directions. Moseley found that the exact number of lanthanides had to be 15 and that element 61 still wasn't

Get Access