| Discovery date | 1774 |
| Discovered by | Joseph Priestley in Wiltshire, England and independently by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Uppsala, Sweden |
| Origin of the name | The name comes from the Greek 'oxy genes', meaning acid forming. |
| Allotropes | O2, O3 |
O
Oxygen
8
15.999
| Group | 16 | Melting point | −218.79°C, −361.82°F, 54.36 K |
| Period | 2 | Boiling point | −182.962°C, −297.332°F, 90.188 K |
| Block | p | Density (g cm−3) | 0.001308 |
| Atomic number | 8 | Relative atomic mass | 15.999 |
| State at 20°C | Gas | Key isotopes | 16O |
| Electron configuration | [He] 2s22p4 | CAS number | 7782-44-7 |
| ChemSpider ID | 140526 | ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database | |
Image explanation
The image represents the fundamental importance of the element in air and, when bonded to hydrogen, in water.
Appearance
A colourless, odourless gas.
Uses
The greatest commercial use of oxygen gas is in the steel industry. Large quantities are also used in the manufacture of a wide range of chemicals including nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. It is also used to make epoxyethane (ethylene oxide), used as antifreeze and to make polyester, and chloroethene, the precursor to PVC.
Oxygen gas is used for oxy-acetylene welding and cutting of metals. A growing use is in the treatment of sewage and of effluent from industry.
Biological role
Oxygen first appeared in the Earth’s atmosphere around 2 billion years ago, accumulating from the photosynthesis of blue-green algae. Photosynthesis uses energy from the sun to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen passes into the atmosphere and the hydrogen joins with carbon dioxide to produce biomass.
When living things need energy they take in oxygen for respiration. The oxygen returns to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.
Oxygen gas is fairly soluble in water, which makes aerobic life in rivers, lakes and oceans possible.
Natural abundance
Oxygen makes up 21% of the atmosphere by volume. This is halfway between 17% (below which breathing for unacclimatised people becomes difficult) and 25% (above which many organic compounds are highly flammable). The element and its compounds make up 49.2% by mass of the Earth’s crust, and about two-thirds of the human body.
There are two key methods used to obtain oxygen gas. The first is by the distillation of liquid air. The second is to pass clean, dry air through a zeolite that absorbs nitrogen and leaves oxygen. A newer method, which gives oxygen of a higher purity, is to pass air over a partially permeable ceramic membrane.
In the laboratory it can be prepared by the electrolysis of water or by adding a manganese(IV) oxide catalyst to aqueous hydrogen peroxide.
In 1608, Cornelius Drebbel had shown that heating saltpetre (potassium nitrate, KNO3) released a gas. This was oxygen although it was not identified as such.
The credit for discovering oxygen is now shared by three chemists: an Englishman, a Swede, and a Frenchman. Joseph Priestley was the first to publish an account of oxygen, having made it in 1774 by focussing sunlight on to mercuric oxide (HgO), and collecting the gas which came off. He noted that a candle burned more brightly in it and that it made breathing easier. Unknown to Priestly, Carl Wilhelm Scheele had produced oxygen in June 1771. He had written an account of his discovery but it was not published until 1777. Antoine Lavoisier also claimed to have discovered oxygen, and he proposed that the new gas be called oxy-gène, meaning acid-forming, because he thought it was the basis of all acids.
| Atomic radius, non-bonded (Å) | 1.52 | Covalent radius (Å) | 0.64 |
| Electron affinity (kJ mol−1) | 140.976 |
Electronegativity (Pauling scale) |
3.44 |
|
Ionisation energies (kJ mol−1) |
1st
1313.942
2nd
3388.671
3rd
5300.47
4th
7469.271
5th
10989.584
6th
13326.526
7th
71330.65
8th
84078.3
|
||
|
| Common oxidation states | -1, -2 | ||||
| Isotopes | Isotope | Atomic mass | Natural abundance (%) | Half life | Mode of decay |
| 16O | 15.995 | 99.757 | - | - | |
| 17O | 16.999 | 0.038 | - | - | |
| 18O | 17.999 | 0.205 | - | - | |
|
|
|
Specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1) |
918 | Young's modulus (GPa) | Unknown | |||||||||||
| Shear modulus (GPa) | Unknown | Bulk modulus (GPa) | Unknown | |||||||||||
| Vapour pressure | ||||||||||||||
| Temperature (K) |
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| Pressure (Pa) |
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| Listen to Oxygen Podcast |
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Transcript :
Chemistry in its element: oxygen(Promo) You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. (End promo) Chris Smith Hello! And welcome to Chemistry in its element, where we take a look at the stories behind the elements that make up the world around us. I'm Chris Smith. This week, we are continuing our tour of the periodic table with a lung full of a gas that we can't do without. It protects us from solar radiation, it keeps us alive and by helping things to burn, it also keeps us warm. It is of course oxygen. And to tell its story, here's Mark Peplow. Mark Peplow Little did those humble cyanobacteria realize what they were doing when two and a half billion years ago, they started to build up their own reserves of energy-rich chemicals, by combining water and carbon dioxide. Powered by sunlight, they spent the next two billion years terraforming our entire planet with the waste products of their photosynthesis, a rather toxic gas called oxygen. In fact, those industrious bugs are ultimately responsible for the diversity of life, we see around us today. Oxygen accounts for about 23% of the atmosphere's mass with pairs of oxygen atoms stuck together to make dioxygen molecules, but it's not just in the air, we breathe. Overall, it's the most abundant element on the earth's surface and the third most abundant in the universe after hydrogen and helium. Our planet's rocks are about 46% oxygen by weight, much of it in the form of silicon dioxide, which we know most commonly as sand. And many of the metals we mine from the Earth's crust are also found as their oxides, aluminium in bauxite or iron in hematite, while carbonates such as limestone are also largely made of oxygen and the oceans are of course about 86% oxygen, connected to hydrogen as good old H2O, just about the most perfect solvent you can imagine for biochemistry. Oxygen is also in virtually every molecule in your body including fats, carbohydrates and DNA. In particular, it's the atom that links together the phosphate groups in the energy-carrying molecule ATP. Oxygen is obviously pretty useful for keeping us going, but is also widely used in industry as an oxidant, where it can give up some of that solar energy captured by plant and those cyanobacteria. A stream of oxygen can push the temperature of a blast furnace over 2000 degrees and it allows an oxyacetylene torch to cut straight through metal. The space shuttle is carried into space on an incredible force produced when liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen combine to make water. So who first noticed this ubiquitous stuff? There's certainly some debate about who first identified oxygen as an element, partly because at the time the precise definition of an element still hadn't really been pinned down. English chemist, Joseph Priestley certainly isolated oxygen gas in the 1770s, although he tried to define it as dephlogisticated air. Phlogiston was then thought to be some kind of primordial substance that was the root cause of combustion. Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a fan of phlogiston too and probably discovered oxygen before Priestly did. But it was Antoine Lavoisier, sometimes called the father of modern chemistry, who was the first to truly identify oxygen as an element and in doing so, he really helped to firm up the definition that an element is something that cannot be broken down by any kind of chemical analysis. This also helped him to kill off the phlogiston theory, which was a crucial step in the evolution of chemistry. Oxygen isn't only about the dioxygen molecules that sustain us. There is another form, trioxygen, also known as ozone and it's also pretty important in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, is responsible for filtering out harmful ultraviolet rays, but unfortunately, ozone is also pretty toxic. So it's bad news that tons of the gas are produced by the reactions between hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides churned out by cars every day. If only we could transplant the stuff, straight up into the stratosphere! Now ozone is normally spread so thinly in the air, that you can't see its pale blue colour and oxygen gas is colourless unless you liquefy it, but there is one place where you can see the gas in all its glory. The aurora or polar lights, where particles from the solar wind slam into oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere to produce the swirling green and red colours that have entranced humans for millennia. Chris Smith So why life is a gas, that was Mark Peplow revealing the secrets of the element that we can't live without. Next time on Chemistry in its element, Johnny Ball joins us to tell the story of a chemical that's craved by Olympic athletes, makes good hi-five connectors and is also a favourite for fillings. And that's in teeth, not pies. Johnny Ball Today one gram can be beaten into a square meter sheet just 230 atoms thick, one cubic centimetre would make a sheet 18 square meters, 1 gram could be drawn out to make 165 meters of wire just 1/200th of a millimetre thick. The gold colour in Buckingham Palace fence is actually gold; gold covered because it lasts 30 years; whereas gold paint which actually contains no gold at all lasts in tip-top condition only a year or so. Chris Smith So all that glitters isn't gold, but some is, and you can find out why on next week's Chemistry in its element. I'm Chris Smith, thanks for listening. See you next time. (Promo) Chemistry in its element is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry and produced by thenakedscientists.com. There's more information and other episodes of Chemistry in its element on our website at chemistryworld.org/elements. (End promo)
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Visual Elements images and videos
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
Data
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
Uses and properties
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Supply risk data
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
History text
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Podcasts
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Periodic Table of Videos
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
