Technetium
Technetium is a chemical element with the symbol Tc and atomic number 43. It is the lightest element whose isotopes are all radioactive. In 1952, astronomer Paul W. Merrill in California detected the spectral signature of technetIUM in red giants. The element was the first to be artificially produced, since it was the only element to be detected near the end of their lives.
About Technetium in brief
Technetium is a chemical element with the symbol Tc and atomic number 43. It is the lightest element whose isotopes are all radioactive, none of which are stable other than the fully ionized state of 97Tc. The most common naturally occurring isotope is 99Tc, in traces only. One shortlived gamma ray-emitting nuclear isomer, technetium-99m, is used in nuclear medicine for a wide variety of tests, such as bone cancer diagnoses. In 1952, astronomer Paul W. Merrill in California detected the spectral signature of technetIUM in red giants. The element was the first to be artificially produced, since it was the only element to be detected near the end of their lives. It lies between manganese and ruthenium in group 7 of the periodic table, and its chemical properties are intermediate between those of both adjacent elements. The discovery of element 43 was finally confirmed in a 1937 experiment at the University of Palermo in Sicily by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè. In 1947, the element 43 was named after the Greek word Panormus, meaning ‘artificial’ or ‘panoramic’ The element is now used in some ten million medical procedures every year, including bone cancer diagnosis and some nuclear medicine tests. Because no isotope of Technetium has a half-life longer than 4.21 million years, the 1952 detection oftechnetium in red giant stars helped to prove that stars can produce heavier elements.
It was also the first element found to be radioactive, but this was later disproved by the discovery of neutron capture in molybdenum ores in the 1950s. In 1937, the first predominantly artificial element was produced, hence its name, “technetia” The element 43 is the most common fission product in uranium ore and thorium ore, the mostcommon source, or the product of neutron captured in mlybdenium ores. It has a radioactivity of about 1.5 to 2.5 times the normal atomic number of 1Tc and is the second most common radioactive element in the Earth’s atmosphere. It can also be found in uranium-235 in nuclear reactors and is extracted from nuclear fuel rods. Its chemical properties had been predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev before it was discovered. In 1871, MendeleEV predicted this missing element would occupy the empty place below manganee and have similar chemical properties. He gave it the provisional name ekamanganese because the predicted element was one place down from the known element Manganese. The location in the table suggested that it should be easier to find than other undiscovered elements. In 1933, a series of articles quoted the name masurium for element 43, but later experimenters could not replicate the discovery, and it was dismissed as an error for many years. The team claimed to detect a faint X-ray signal at a wavelength produced by element 43.
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This page is based on the article Technetium published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
