Noble Gas | Definition, Elements, Properties, Characteristics, & Facts

History

In 1785 Henry Cavendish, an English chemist and physicist, found that air contains a small proportion (slightly less than 1 percent) of a substance that is chemically less active than nitrogen. A century later Lord Rayleigh, an English physicist, isolated from the air a gas that he thought was pure nitrogen, but he found that it was denser than nitrogen that had been prepared by liberating it from its compounds. He reasoned that his aerial nitrogen must contain a small amount of a denser gas. In 1894, Sir William Ramsay, a Scottish chemist, collaborated with Rayleigh in isolating this gas, which proved to be a new element—argon.

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After the discovery of argon, and at the instigation of other scientists, in 1895 Ramsay investigated the gas released upon heating the mineral clevite, which was thought to be a source of argon. Instead, the gas was helium, which in 1868 had been detected spectroscopically in the Sun but had not been found on Earth. Ramsay and his coworkers searched for related gases and by fractional distillation of liquid air discovered krypton, neon, and xenon, all in 1898. Radon was first identified in 1900 by German chemist Friedrich E. Dorn; it was established as a member of the noble-gas group in 1904. Rayleigh and Ramsay won Nobel Prizes in 1904 for their work.

In 1895 the French chemist Henri Moissan, who discovered elemental fluorine in 1886 and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906 for that discovery, failed in an attempt to bring about a reaction between fluorine and argon. This result was significant because fluorine is the most reactive element in the periodic table. In fact, all late 19th- and early 20th-century efforts to prepare chemical compounds of argon failed. The lack of chemical reactivity implied by these failures was of significance in the development of theories of atomic structure. In 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed that the electrons in atoms are arranged in successive shells having characteristic energies and capacities and that the capacities of the shells for electrons determine the numbers of elements in the rows of the periodic table. On the basis of experimental evidence relating chemical properties to electron distributions, it was suggested that in the atoms of the noble gases heavier than helium, the electrons are arranged in these shells in such a way that the outermost shell always contains eight electrons, no matter how many others (in the case of radon, 78 others) are arranged within the inner shells.

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In a theory of chemical bonding advanced by American chemist Gilbert N. Lewis and German chemist Walther Kossel in 1916, this octet of electrons was taken to be the most stable arrangement for the outermost shell of any atom. Although only the noble-gas atoms possessed this arrangement, it was the condition toward which the atoms of all other elements tended in their chemical bonding. Certain elements satisfied this tendency by either gaining or losing electrons outright, thereby becoming ions; other elements shared electrons, forming stable combinations linked together by covalent bonds. The proportions in which atoms of elements combined to form ionic or covalent compounds (their “valences”) were thus controlled by the behaviour of their outermost electrons, which—for this reason—were called valence electrons. This theory explained the chemical bonding of the reactive elements, as well as the noble gases’ relative inactivity, which came to be regarded as their chief chemical characteristic. (See also chemical bonding: Bonds between atoms.)

Screened from the nucleus by intervening electrons, the outer (valence) electrons of the atoms of the heavier noble gases are held less firmly and can be removed (ionized) more easily from the atoms than can the electrons of the lighter noble gases. The energy required for the removal of one electron is called the first ionization energy. In 1962, while working at the University of British Columbia, British chemist Neil Bartlett discovered that platinum hexafluoride would remove an electron from (oxidize) molecular oxygen to form the salt [O2+][PtF6−]. The first ionization energy of xenon is very close to that of oxygen; thus Bartlett thought that a salt of xenon might be formed similarly. In the same year, Bartlett established that it is indeed possible to remove electrons from xenon by chemical means. He showed that the interaction of PtF6 vapour in the presence of xenon gas at room temperature produced a yellow-orange solid compound then formulated as [Xe+][PtF6−]. (This compound is now known to be a mixture of [XeF+][PtF6−], [XeF+] [Pt2F11−], and PtF5.) Shortly after the initial report of this discovery, two other teams of chemists independently prepared and subsequently reported fluorides of xenon—namely, XeF2 and XeF4. These achievements were soon followed by the preparation of other xenon compounds and of the fluorides of radon (1962) and krypton (1963).

Key People: Sir William Ramsay Friedrich Adolf Paneth (Show more) Related Topics: xenon helium krypton radon argon (Show more) On the Web: National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Noble-Gas Chemistry More than Half a Century after the First Report of the Noble-Gas Compound (Jan. 30, 2026) (Show more) See all related content

In 2006, scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, announced that oganesson, the next noble gas, had been made in 2002 and 2005 in a cyclotron. (Most elements with atomic numbers greater than 92—i.e., the transuranium elements—have to be made in particle accelerators.) No physical or chemical properties of oganesson can be directly determined since only a few atoms of oganesson have been produced.