An old bottle of rubidium chloride from Merck.
Rubidium is a chemical element with symbol Rb and atomic number 37. Rubidium is a soft, silvery-white metallic element of the alkali metal group what colors flame with a red color (will be posted later) and it is a slightly radioactive.
Naturally occurring rubidium is composed of two isotopes: the stable 85Rb (72.2%) and the radioactive 87Rb (27.8%). Rubidium-87 has a half-life of 48.8×10^9 years (4880000000 years), which is more than three times the age of the universe of (13.798±0.037)×10^9 years. Natural rubidium has a specific activity 670 Bq/g, enough to significantly expose a photographic film in 110 days, so probably nobody will die from radiation poisoning from rubidium.
Rubidium was discovered in 1861 with the newly developed method of flame spectroscopy by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff.
We had 62 g of rubidium metal what was opened and ampuled almost two year ago. There is a few picture about this over here: http://labphoto.tumblr.com/tagged/rubidium
9:30 pm • 29 November 2014 • 140 notes • View comments
And finally, the last ampule of rubidium is also sealed. Noone got injured, no problem happened and we’ve got a nice collection of rubidium samples(:
9:30 pm • 2 February 2013 • 13 notes • View comments
Rubidium should melt in ampule with great care, it always should be kept under inert gas (supplied from that pasteour pipette left side).
9:30 pm • 1 February 2013 • 18 notes • View comments
Because of the high pyrophoricity of rubidium we should work with it under argon atmosphere. Finally it is opened and we could start is!
9:30 pm • 30 January 2013 • 16 notes • View comments
A close view of the rubidium container. If it would break I think everyone would be really-really surprised.
The yellow stuff if rubidium oxide and the metallic part is the interesting(:
9:30 pm • 29 January 2013 • 30 notes • View comments
This is my 300.-th post so this have to be somethings special(:
This week is Rubidium week, we will open a 62g ampoule and seal it into smaller, 5g parts.
Anyone is interested? It will be awesome!
Rubidium is a pyrophoric metal with a 39 Celsius melting point, so we should work under Argon atmosphere. 1g metallic Rb costs 200 USD and it is also a littlebit radioactive.
9:30 pm • 28 January 2013 • 16 notes • View comments
Some rare stuff: metallic rubidium(:
Did you know that rubidium is slightly radioactive with a half-life of 49 billion years, what is more than three times longer than the estimated age of the universe.
And also an interesting fact that rubidium is much more rare than cesium what is under rubidium on the periodic table.
9:22 pm • 19 July 2012 • 23 notes • View comments
