All practice pages/Interatomic theory/Elements
Element 39, a transition metal
The first element pulled out of the ores of Ytterby, a Swedish village that gave its name to four elements.
Period 5, group 3. The other transition metals are tinted, and every cell opens its own article.
Yttrium has 39 electrons, one for every proton, so the atom carries no charge. Below are the same 39 electrons written two ways.
1s² 2s² 2p⁶ 3s² 3p⁶ 3d¹⁰ 4s² 4p⁶ 4d¹ 5s²
Short form: [Kr] 4d¹ 5s², where [Kr] stands for the 36 electrons krypton already has.
That list runs by shell. In the order the subshells fill it reads [Kr] 5s² 4d¹, because a subshell fills by its energy, not by its shell number.
The simple form counts electrons shell by shell. The orbital form says which subshell each one sits in: s holds 2, p holds 6, d holds 10 and f holds 14. Shell 3 here is 3s² 3p⁶ 3d¹⁰, and 2 + 6 + 10 is 18.
Yttrium sits in period 5 and has 5 shells. The period number counts the shells.
The outer shell holds 2 electrons. Those are the ones yttrium can lose, gain or share, so they are the ones that decide what it bonds with.
Yttrium gives up three electrons to form Y³⁺, and it behaves so much like the lanthanides that it is counted among the rare earth elements.
Found with the lanthanides in rare earth ores such as xenotime, monazite and ion-adsorption clays, mostly in China. Rocks brought back from the Moon are unusually rich in it.
Johan Gadolin identified a new earth, yttria, in 1794 in a black mineral from the Ytterby quarry near Stockholm, and Friedrich Wöhler isolated the metal in 1828. The same village also named ytterbium, terbium and erbium.
Yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) crystals make the phosphors in white LEDs and the lasers used in surgery and metal cutting. Yttria-stabilized zirconia makes tough ceramics, dental crowns and the oxygen sensors in car exhausts, and yttrium barium copper oxide was one of the first superconductors to work at liquid nitrogen temperature.