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Helium

Nik of Sente Software going Up in the world

Helium gas is much lighter than air, and has the advantage over hydrogen in that it isn't inflammable at all! If there were a book about Helium Chemistry it would be a very thin volume as helium forms no compounds and doesn't react with any other elements. It's an inert monatomic gas. So it has physics, but no chemistry!

Helium becomes liquid at about 4 Kelvin (minus 269 Celsius). Solid helium exists at even lower temperatures but not at atmospheric pressure. It has to be twenty atmospheres to be solid.

Helium gas is used for balloons, blimps, airships, and for breathing in to make a squeaky voice. (this practice, of breathing helium so as to increase the pitch of your voice so you sound like it's been sampled and increased in speed/pitch is always advised against because of the risk of asphyxiation! However, if you were going to do the trick you'd have to do it with some friends present to show off to, so it would not be as dangerous as the "safe" lobby would suggest). It's also possible to safely breathe Heliox, a diving-gas mixture of helium and oxygen, which saves divers from the horrors of The Bends but has a curious side-effect of the alteration of the vocals. Also, helium conducts heat much better than the more usual Nitrogen in air. Therefore divers using heliox have to have their cylinders warmed up to avoid hypothermia.

Liquid Helium can be used for a variety of cryogenic purposes. It's quite expensive but at that temperature (within four degrees of absolute zero) it's quite useful. Helium3 is a superfluid and behaves in some very odd ways!

"Helium" is named after Helios, (the Sun) as the element was first found in the Sun (This was done without having to overcome the technical difficulties of landing on the Sun, as the helium was detected by means of lines in the spectrum, indicating the presence of the element).

Stars shine by hydrogen fusion, producing helium, and then helium fusion, producing heavier elements.

Here's a set of helium-related links:

Nik Allday's BLIMP story

The original paper on the discovery of Helium3

How Stuff Works; Helium Balloons

Also see: Airships

www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/2216/

http://astrosun.tn.cornell.edu/courses/astro201/helium_burn.htm

http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/2.html

http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/He.html

www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/He/key.html

www.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/nph-pertab/element/He

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