argon summary

Learn about the properties and uses of argon

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see argon.

argon, Chemical element, chemical symbol Ar, atomic number 18. Colourless, odourless, and tasteless, it is the most abundant of the noble gases on Earth and the one most used in industry. It constitutes about 1% of air and is obtained by distillation of liquid air. Argon provides an inert gas shield in welding and brazing, in lightbulbs and lasers, in Geiger counters, and in the production and fabrication of certain metals. Because a radioactive form of argon is produced by decay of a naturally occurring radioactive potassium isotope, it can be used to date rocks and samples more than 100,000 years old.

Lord Rayleigh Summary

Lord Rayleigh was an English physical scientist who made fundamental discoveries in the fields of acoustics and optics that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of argon, an inert atmospheric gas. Strutt