Discovery date : 1901
Discovered by: Eugène-Anatole Demarçay
Origin of the name: Europium is named after Europe
Allotropes :
~>EUROPIUM is a chemical element with symbol Eu and atomic number 63. It was isolated in 1901 and is named after the continent of Europe. It is a moderately hard, silvery metal which readily oxidizes in air and water.
| FACT BOX | |||
| Group | Lanthanides | Melting point | 822°C, 1512°F, 1095 K |
| Period | 6 | Boiling point | 1529°C, 2784°F, 1802 K |
| Block | f | Density (g cm−3) | 5.24 |
| Atomic number | 63 | Relative atomic mass | 151.964 |
| State at 20°C | Solid | Key isotopes | 153Eu |
| Electron configuration | [Xe] 4f76s2 | CAS number | 7440-53-1 |
| ChemSpider ID | 22417 | ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database | |
Europium’s story is part of the complex history of the rare earths, aka lanthanoids. It began with cerium which was discovered in 1803. In 1839 Carl Mosander separated two other elements from it: lanthanum and one he called didymium which turned out to be a mixture of two rare earths, praseodymium and neodymium, as revealed by Karl Auer in 1879. Even so, it still harboured another rarer metal, samarium, separated by Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, and even that was impure. In 1886 Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac extracted gadolinium, from it, but that was still not the end of the story. In 1901, Eugène-Anatole Demarçay carried out a painstaking sequence of crystallisations of samarium magnesium nitrate, and separated yet another new element: europium.