I had to do a project on Yttrium over the weekend, and it's actually really interesting- mixed with europium, it goes into fireproof bricks. Mixed with iron, it's in the red pixels that you see when you look really close at your TV. It's in lasers, camera lenses, radar, and goes into making garnets, aka fake diamonds. Its melting point is around 1523 degrees Celsius, and its boiling point is about 3336 degrees Celsius. Yttrium 90, which is somewhat unstable and radioactive, is more precise than a scalpel and is used in surgeries where they have to cut the pain transmission nerves in the spine. Y 90 is also used in cancer pills because of its radioactivity. It will attach itself to the cancer cells and destroy them, kind of like chemotherapy except from the inside out.
Yttrium in the air around us in a very small percentile, as well as in the human body and is about 4 ppm in human bones and breast milk and around 30 ppm in salt water. It is only dangerous if it's finely ground and the room temperature is above 400 degrees Celsius.
It was picked up in rock form by Carl Axel Arrhenius in 1787 in a quarry near Ytterby, Sweden, who thought it was Tungsten and sent it to some chemists for closer inspection. Johan Gadolin studied it and published his findings on Yttrium in 1794.
Yttrium an oxide and is never naturally found by itself, always mixed with other chemicals. Its only truly stable isotope is Y 89, which is its only naturally occurring isotope as well. In its natural form it's a rock that is metallic silver in color.
Yttrium ROCKS!
