How To Set Up An Oxygen Cylinder
Facts Almost Oxygen
Exhale in … exhale out. Ahh. Hooray for oxygen, the element that keeps much of life on Earth humming.
Element No. 8 on the Periodic Table of the Elements is a colorless gas that makes up 21 percent of World'south atmosphere. Considering it's all around, oxygen is easy to dismiss as dull and inert; in fact, it's the almost reactive of the non-metal elements.
Earth has been oxygenated for about two.3 billion to 2.4 billion years, and levels began to creep upwards at least two.five billion years ago, co-ordinate to a 2007 NASA-funded study. No i knows quite why this lung-friendly gas all of a sudden became a meaning part of the atmosphere, but information technology's possible that geologic changes on Earth led to oxygen produced past photosynthesizing organisms sticking effectually, rather than beingness consumed in geologic reactions, co-ordinate to the study researchers.
Just the Facts
- Atomic Number (number of protons in the nucleus): 8
- Atomic Symbol (on the Periodic Table of Elements): O
- Atomic Weight (average mass of the cantlet): fifteen.9994
- Density: 0.001429 grams per cubic centimeter
- Stage at Room Temperature: Gas
- Melting Point: minus 361.82 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 218.79 degrees Celsius)
- Boiling Point: minus 297.31 degrees F (minus 182.95 degrees C)
- Number of isotopes (atoms of the same element with a unlike number of neutrons): xi; three stable
- Most common isotopes: O-16 (99.757 percent natural affluence)
Jiff of life
Oxygen is the third near abundant chemical element in the universe, according to the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Withal, its reactivity made it relatively rare in early Earth's atmosphere.
Cyanobacteria, which are organisms that "breathe" using photosynthesis, take in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, just like modern plants. Cyanobacteria were probable responsible for the showtime oxygen on World, an outcome grandly known every bit the Great Oxidation Event.
Photosynthesis by cyanobacteria was likely ongoing before significant levels of oxygen built upwards in Earth'due south temper; a March 2022 written report published in the journal Nature Geoscience constitute that 2.95 billion-yr-onetime rocks constitute in Due south Africa contained oxides that would have required gratuitous oxygen to form. These rocks were originally in shallow seas, suggesting that oxygen from photosynthesis offset began to accumulate in marine environments almost half a billion years before it began to accumulate in the temper around 2.5 billion years ago.
Life today depends heavily on oxygen, but the initial build-upwardly of this element in the temper was nothing short of a disaster. The new atmosphere caused a mass extinction of anaerobes, which are organisms that don't require oxygen. Anaerobes that were unable to conform or survive in the presence of oxygen died off in this new world. [Infographic: World'due south Atmosphere Pinnacle to Bottom]
Fast forrad — way forward. The beginning inkling humans had of the existence of oxygen as an chemical element was in 1608, when Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel reported that the heating of saltpeter (potassium nitrate) released a gas, co-ordinate to the Royal Gild of Chemistry (RSC). The identity of that gas remained a mystery until the 1770s, when iii chemists converged on its discovery more or less at the same time. English language pharmacist and clergyman Joseph Priestly isolated oxygen by shining sunlight on mercuric oxide and collecting the gas from the reaction. He noted that a candle burned more brightly in this gas, according to the RSC, cheers to oxygen'southward function in combustion.
Priestly published his findings in 1774, beating out Swiss scientist Carl Wilhelm Steele, who had actually isolated oxygen in 1771 and written about it, just not published the piece of work. Oxygen'south third discoverer was Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, a French chemist who gave the element its name. The word comes from the Greek "oxy" and "genes," significant "acid-forming."
Oxygen has 8 total electrons — two orbit the nucleus in the atom's inner shell and six orbit in the outermost vanquish. The outermost shell tin concur a total of eight electrons, which explains oxygen'south tendency to react with other elements: Its outer beat is incomplete, and electrons are thus free for the taking (and giving).
Who knew?
- As a gas, oxygen is clear. Simply as a liquid, it's pale blue.
- If you've e'er wondered what swimming in a pool of liquid oxygen would be like, the answer is: very, very cold, according to Carl Zorn of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Oxygen must get down to minus 297.3 F (minus 183.0 C) to liquefy, so frostbite would be a trouble.
- Too little oxygen is problematic. So is also much. Animate 80 percent oxygen for more than 12 hours irritates the respiratory tract and can eventually cause deadly fluid build-upward, or edema, according to the University of Florida and the company Air Products.
- Oxygen is one tough cookie: A 2022 written report published in the periodical Physical Review Letters plant than an oxygen molecule (O2) can survive pressures 19 million times higher than atmospheric pressure.
- The lowest levels of oxygen e'er recorded in human being blood were measured near the summit of Mount Everest in 2009. Climbers had arterial oxygen levels of 3.28 kilopascals on average. Compare that to the normal value of 12 to xiv kilopascals, and the mountaineering term "death zone" makes enough of sense. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Thank goodness for an temper of 21 percent oxygen. Most 300 million years ago, when oxygen levels reached 35 percent, insects were able to abound super-large: Remember dragonflies with the wingspans of hawks.
Current research
Oxygen forms in the hearts of stars, with the fusion of a carbon-12 nucleus and a helium-iv nucleus (likewise known every bit an alpha particle). Information technology's only recently, however, that scientists have been able to peer into the nucleus of oxygen and unravel its structure.
In March 2022, North Carolina State University physicist Dean Lee and his colleagues reported that they'd figured out the nuclear structure of oxygen-xvi, the most mutual isotope of oxygen, in its ground state (the state at which all electrons are at the lowest possible energy levels) and in its get-go excited state (the adjacent energy level up).
Why should such a matter thing? Well, to empathize how nuclei form in stars — from carbon to oxygen to heavier elements — is to understand how the very edifice blocks of the universe snap together. Lee and his team originally discovered that the nucleus of a carbon-12 molecule, with its vi protons and 6 neutrons, is really fabricated of iii particle clusters, each with ii protons and 2 neutrons. If carbon-12 had three of these and so-called alpha clusters, the researchers reasoned, oxygen-16 was likely to have four, given that information technology has eight protons and viii neutrons.
Using supercomputer simulations and a numerical lattice, the researchers were able to see how the particles in an oxygen-sixteen nucleus would arrange themselves. They found that in the ground country of oxygen-16, there are indeed four alpha clusters, arranged neatly in a tetrahedron.
"These alpha clusters are sort of like little fuzzy spheres of these four particles, or these nucleons, and these fuzzy spheres similar to touch each other past some surface interaction," Lee told Live Science. The tetrahedron configuration allows them to get nice and snug.
Only there was another quantum mystery waiting to be unraveled. The ground land of oxygen-16 and the first excited state share an unusual feature. They both have the same spin — a value indicating how the particles rotate. They also both have positive parity, a style to indicate symmetry. Imagine inverting left and correct in the unabridged universe, but having to go on subatomic particles in the same shape. Particles with positive parity would be able to look in this mirror universe and see themselves as they are. Particles with negative parity would have to flip-flop, lest they end up backwards like a line of text read in a mirror.
"The mystery was why the lowest two states of oxygen-16 have naught spin and positive parity," Lee said, given that u.s.a. are dissimilar.
The simulations gave an answer: In its excited state, oxygen-sixteen rearranges its nucleus to look little like the ground country at all. Instead of a tetrahedral system, the alpha particles arrange themselves in a square or near-square airplane.
"Their underlying intrinsic structures were different," Lee said. The totally unlike configuration explains how spin and parity could remain the aforementioned — the nuclei take different paths to the aforementioned result.
There are still more breakthrough interactions in the oxygen-16 nucleus to detangle, Lee said, and finer-grained detail to observe.
"There are actually quite a lot of interesting things going inside of little things like nuclei," he said. "And there are stories that are existence told about how they are beingness made that nosotros are now starting to be able to address."
Lee'southward work looks to oxygen's nativity in the stars; another line of oxygen research focuses on the element's function in life on Earth. Presently after the Great Oxidation Event some 2.four billion years ago, oxygen levels may take reached or exceeded today's levels before crashing, said Daniel Mills, a doctoral candidate at the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the Academy of Southern Denmark. Animal life didn't testify upwardly until far later, with the simplest animals appearing around 600 million years ago.
Despite theories that the rise of oxygen paved the mode for the beingness of animals, the story appears to exist far more complex. Animals did non announced during the get-go significant bump in Earth'due south oxygen levels 2.4 billion years ago. And in February 2022, Mills and his colleagues reported in the periodical PNAS that modern-solar day sponges can still breathe, eat and even grow in oxygen levels 0.5 percent to 4 per centum of what is found in Earth's atmosphere today. Sponges are the probably the most similar living animal to the first animals on Globe, Mills told Alive Science.
The finding that sponges don't demand high oxygen to live suggests that something else contributed to the rise of the beginning brute life — though rising oxygen may well have been necessary to reach the kind of multifariousness and ecosystems nosotros encounter today, Mills said. Even in the modern era, animals such as nematode worms thrive in depression-oxygen areas of the sea, he added.
"There is clearly more to fauna evolution than an aplenty supply of oxygen," Mills said.
Boosted resources
- An interactive graphic created past the Howard Hughes Medical Found also shows the geologic history of oxygen, offset about 3.8 billion years ago.
- Learn more than about what makes upwards Globe'south atmosphere today, all virtually air pressure and volume, and weather at this kids site by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
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Source: https://www.livescience.com/28738-oxygen.html
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