• Question: what is your favourite element

    Asked by anon-217326 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison, Edoardo on 10 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Edoardo Vescovi

      Edoardo Vescovi answered on 10 Jun 2019: last edited 10 Jun 2019 4:04 pm

      Helium.
      Elements are 100% made of one type of atoms in the so-called periodic table (you should see it in chemistry at some point). Helium sits on the 2nd slot because it contains 2 particles called protons. It is one of the most found elements in the universe, it is produced by the sun while shining light on us, it is light enough to make balloons float in the air and make us squeak weirdly when breathed in small quantity!

    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Hydrogen because it is the simplest element and the most ancient. Most of the hydrogen was formed about 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang.

    • Photo: Joanna Huang

      Joanna Huang answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Hydrogen, because when you really get down to it, one could argue that all matter is some derivative of it. In the middle of the sun for example, where the temperature and pressure are extremely high, Hydrogen atoms are compressed and fuse together, creating Helium.

    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      I think carbon is pretty cool because it (amongst many other elements) is essential for life as we know it. Living beings all contain a special form of carbon (carbon-14) which is radioactive and remains radioactive long after we die due to its very long half-life of over 5,000 years (how long it takes for the radioactivity to drop by half). We can use this radioactivity to tell us how old fossils are – this is called “carbon dating”. Carbon can also be found in lots of different forms – the graphite in your pencil is made of carbon but carbon also is the only element found in diamond. If you put enough pressure on your pencil, you may just be able to turn it into diamond 😉 You might have heard of the material called graphene (its discovery won the Noble prize in physics in 2010). Graphene is just a single layer of carbon that has some crazy properties! So all in all, carbon is an element with a lot of different talents!

    • Photo: Lucy Budge

      Lucy Budge answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      I’m not sure I have a favourite element – however if you make a spoon out of gallium it looks just like a normal spoon, so you can give it to someone to stir their tea with. However when they put it in the hot water it melts away! So it’s a nice little joke to play on them…

    • Photo: Philippe Gambron

      Philippe Gambron answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      Iron. It’s the most stable one. It’s the reason why certain massive stars can have an iron core towards the end of their evolution.

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