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Asked by anon-187164 to Stewart, Miriam on 9 Nov 2018.
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Miriam Hogg answered on 9 Nov 2018:
Hydrogen! The big bang created all matter and most of it was in the form of Hydrogen and Helium (and a bit of Lithium). All stars are made of mostly Hydrogen and it’s a basic building block for everything!
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Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 9 Nov 2018:
The element of surprise!
jk, sorry, bad joke
I think it’s probably helium. Helium is interesting because it was predicted before it was discovered: the name comes from Helios, the Greek word for the Sun. It was a bright yellow line detected in sunlight:
It was only a few years later that it was actually found on Earth. It’s lighter than air (as you know from balloons) and a lot of it is extracted during oil drilling – when we run out of oil, we will run out of helium. So maybe take it easy on the balloons?
Helium is also really useful for cooling down a type of magnet so they use less electricity (this is called superconductivity). We use these magnets at the Large Hadron Collider (to keep protons going round in a circle) and also in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (for doctors to look at the brain etc).
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