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rhenium

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Also known as Re, element 75, 75Re, nipponium

Rhenium is a chemical element; it has symbol Re and atomic number 75. It is a silvery-gray, heavy, third-row transition metal in group 7 of the periodic table. With an estimated average concentration of 1 part per billion (ppb), rhenium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust. It has one of the highest melting and boiling points of any element. It resembles manganese and technetium chemically and is mainly obtained as a by-product of the extraction and refinement of molybdenum and copper ores. It shows in its compounds a wide variety of oxidation states ranging from −3 to +7.

OverviewAI-generated

Rhenium is a chemical element with the symbol Re and atomic number 75. Its standard atomic weight is 186.207. The element has an electronegativity of 1.9 and an ionic radius of 0.63. It commonly exhibits an oxidation state of 7. The electron configuration of rhenium is [Xe] 4f¹⁴ 5d⁵ 6s².

Rhenium was discovered in 1925. The IUPAC name for the element is rhenium. In chemical representations, it is identified by the canonical SMILES string [Re] and the Unicode character 錸. The PubChem CID for rhenium is 23947. It has a topological polar surface area of 0 and carries no charge. There are no hydrogen bond donors or acceptors associated with the neutral element.

Synthesized by Vinony from 25 facts across 4 sources: Wikidata, PubChem, PubMed, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Chemical data

Formula
Re
Molecular weight
186.207 g/mol
IUPAC name
rhenium
SMILES
[Re]
InChIKey
WUAPFZMCVAUBPE-UHFFFAOYSA-N
Polar surface area
0 Ų
H-bond donors
0
H-bond acceptors
0
Formal charge
0

via PubChem

Research

4,870 papers

via PubMed

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

21 sections
Contents
  • History
  • Characteristics
  • Isotopes
  • Compounds
  • Halides and oxyhalides
  • Oxides and sulfides
  • Other compounds
  • Organorhenium compounds
  • Nonahydridorhenate
  • Analytical chemistry of rhenium
  • Occurrence
  • Production
  • Applications
  • Alloys
  • Catalysts
  • Other uses
  • Precautions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Further reading
  • External links

Rhenium is a chemical element; it has symbol Re and atomic number 75. It is a silvery-gray, heavy, third-row transition metal in group 7 of the periodic table. With an estimated average concentration of 1 part per billion (ppb), rhenium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust. It has one of the highest melting and boiling points of any element. It resembles manganese and technetium chemically and is mainly obtained as a by-product of the extraction and refinement of molybdenum and copper ores. It shows in its compounds a wide variety of oxidation states ranging from −3 to +7.

Rhenium was originally discovered in 1908 by Masataka Ogawa, but he mistakenly assigned it as element 43 (now known as technetium) rather than element 75 and named it nipponium. It was rediscovered in 1925 by Walter Noddack, Ida Tacke and Otto Berg, who gave it its present name. It was named after the river Rhine in Europe, from which the earliest samples had been obtained and worked commercially.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “rhenium” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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