Kryptos- greek word meaning "hidden". Krypton
is found in the atmosphere of Mars, natural gas, volcanoes, hot springs
but most plentiful in Earths atmosphere. It's not widely used
because of high cost of production. It's not found in living things
and is an inert gas. Krypton is not harmful. It is odorless,
colorless, tasteless, and it forms very few chemical compounds.
Krypton is used in high speed photography, florescent,
and incandescent electric lights. The most important application
is in the flashing stroboscopic lamps that light up airport runways during
hours of darkness. In 1898, krypton was discovered when liquefied
atmospheric gases were carefully analyzed. Until this time, only
helium (1868) and argon (1894) had been discovered. But because of
the wide difference in the atomic masses of (atomic mass = 4.0026 amu for
helium and atomic mass = 39.948 amu for argon), it was suspected that more
gaseous elements belonging to this group of gases existed. The cold
residues that remained after the liquid helium and argon were drawn off
were carefully examined. Using fractional
distillation, krypton was discovered, it was
a new noble gas. This method was also used to discover neon a few
weeks
later. It ranks seventh on the list of
gases in the earth's atmosphere. Today, the gas is still captured and separated
for commercial and laboratory applications by fractional distillation of
liquid air. None of the naturally occurring isotopes of krypton is
radioactive. The radioactive isotopes of krypton are produced artificially
as byproducts of nuclear power plants. It is used to keep track of
Soviet nuclear production by subtracting off the amount that is generated
from the reactors of the Western world from the total in the air.
Krypton-85 is used as a low cost source of radiation for industrial thickness
gauges and leak testing instruments.
The International Committee of Weights and Measures
once used Krypton-86 as the basis of the international definition of a
meter. The meter was once defined in terms of the vacuum wavelength of
the radiation corresponding to the transition between two atomic levels
of the krypton isotope.
As for Superman's strength zapping nemesis, kryptonite,
the resemblance of the name to krypton the element is purely coincidental. |
