In 1789, a Swedish chemist called Carl Axel Arrhenius made a curious discovery in a quarry of a village called Ytterby. It was a piece of odd-looking black rock. The rock piece contained four elements and one of them was yttrium, named after the village. The village became the namesake of the other elements found in the rock as well, such as, erbium, terbium and ytterbium.
Yttrium is a soft metal. Yttrium in its pure form is stable in the air when it is a large piece. Whenever yttrium is sliced into little shavings or small particles, it starts to become reactive and thus unstable. About 31 parts-per-million of the earth’s crust is yttrium, and that makes it the 30th most common element. The atomic number of Yttrium is 39, and it is represented as Y.
The element zirconium is greyish white in colour. In powder form, zirconium is highly flammable. It is not generally found in nature in its metallic form due to the way the element reacts with water. Moon rock samples retrieved by NASA’s Apollo missions found the presence of zirconium in lunar rock.
Zirconium has the atomic number 40, and it is represented as Zr.
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