All practice pages/Interatomic theory/Elements
Element 75, a transition metal
The last stable element to be discovered and one of the rarest, now working in the hottest parts of jet engines.
Period 6, group 7. The other transition metals are tinted, and every cell opens its own article.
Like other transition metals, rhenium loses its outer s electrons, and often some d electrons as well, to form positive ions, and it can form more than one kind.
One of the rarest elements in the crust. It is recovered from the molybdenite in copper ores, mainly in Chile and the United States.
Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke and Otto Berg found it in Germany in 1925, detecting it by its X-ray spectrum in platinum ore and columbite, and named it after the Rhine. Ida Tacke, later Ida Noddack, was also the first to suggest, in 1934, that heavy nuclei could split, years before fission was discovered.
Nearly all goes into nickel superalloys for jet engine turbine blades, which must stay strong close to their melting point. Platinum-rhenium catalysts help refine high-octane gasoline, and rhenium makes thermocouples and filaments for mass spectrometers.