Hi everyone! In this video I am going to tell you about such a radioactive metal as thorium which has recently been found in most unexpected places.Along with uranium and bismuth, thorium is one of the three radioactive metals which is quite abundant in the Earth’s crust.
source/image: Thoisoi2 – Chemical Experiments!
Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic chemical element with the symbol Th and atomic number 90. Thorium is silvery and tarnishes black when it is exposed to air, forming thorium dioxide; it is moderately soft and malleable and has a high melting point.
Because of having an incredibly long half life of 14.05 billion years, we figured that almost all the thorium present on the Earth had been synthesized as a result of massive explosion of a supernova or a collision of neutron stars long before our Solar system appeared.
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Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Norwegian amateur mineralogist Morten Thrane Esmark and identified by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Its first applications were developed in the late 19th century.
