the.com/curium
a glowing element named for two physicists who never glowed about it themselves
means Curium is a radioactive, silvery synthetic metallic element (atomic number 96), one of the actinides, first produced in 1944 and used chiefly as a power source in space probes.
from Named in honor of Marie and Pierre Curie, the pioneers of radioactivity research, by its discoverers at the University of California, Berkeley, who synthesized it in 1944. The naming deliberately echoed gadolinium, which honors the chemist Johan Gadolin — so curium took its place in the periodic table as a tribute element, the '-ium' ending being the standard suffix for metals. The Curie name itself comes from the French family of Pierre Curie.
- named for
- Marie and Pierre Curie, the radioactive power couple
- self-lit
- glows purple from its own intense radioactivity
- runs hot
- hot enough to boil water by itself
- mars rovers
- its X-rays analyze Martian rocks
- man-made
- first created in a 1944 Berkeley lab
curium-242 — isotope with 163-day half-life, used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators for spacecraft like voyager probes
curium-244 — isotope with 18.1-year half-life, primary fuel in plutonium-238 production and space missions