Chemistry Unfolded

Discovery Of Electron   In the later part of the nineteenth century, scientists began to experiment with glass tubes in which a high-voltage electric current was passed through a gas at low pressure. Under ordinary conditions, gases are poor conductors of electricity, however when a high voltage is applied to them at low pressure, the gases behave as conductors and current flows through them in the form of rays, which interact with the glass tube and cause the glass tube to glow. This flow of electricity is called an electric discharge, and so the tube is called discharge tube. The existence of these rays was studied first by William Crookes in 1879 using discharge tube, which is a long glass tube, sealed at both the ends and fitted with two metal electrodes. It is also known as Crookes tube. The tubes are connected to a vacuum pump which is used to reduce the pressure of gas in the tube.   Tests soon revealed that these rays were, in fact, negatively charged particles movin...

Neutron stars are the Collapsed Core of giant stars that died in a fiery explosion known as a Supernova.  After such an outburst, the cores of these former stars compact into an ultra dense object with the mass of the sun packed into a ball the size of a city. Formation of neutron stars. Ordinary Stars maintain their spherical shape because the heaving gravity of their gigantic mass tries to pull their gas toward a central point, but is balanced by the energy from nuclear fusion in their cores, which exerts an outward pressure. At the end of their lives, stars that are between four and eight times the Solar mass burn through their available fuel and their internal fusion reactions cease. The stars' outer layers rapidly collapse inward, bouncing off the thick core and then blasting out again as a violent supernova. But the dense core continues to collapse, generating pressures so high that protons and electrons are squeezed together into neutrons, as well as...

  A theory of the structure and behavior of atoms has taken more than two millenia to evolve, from the abstract musings of ancient Greek philosophers to the high-tech experiments of modern scientists. However, prior to the scientific revolution and the development of the scientific method starting in the 16th century, ideas about the atom were mainly speculative. It wasn't until the very end of the 19th century that technology became advanced enough to allow scientists a glimpse of the atom's constituent parts: the electron, nucleus, proton, and neutron. Greek Origins                                                                     The idea ...