200 years since the birth of Robert Bunsen - the man thanks to whom we know what the distant stars are made of

Yesterday, March 30, was the 200th birthday of Robert Bunsen, a German chemist who discovered the spectrum of the elements, and in the process opened a new field in chemical analysis and the way to the stars

Yesterday, March 30, was the 200th birthday of Robert Bunsen, a German chemist who discovered the spectrum of the elements. Bunsen was born in Göttingen in the Kingdom of Hanover, today in Germany on March 30, 1811. He is best known for the Bunsen burner, the electrochemical cell made of a carbon and zinc compound, methods in the analysis of gases and the development of spectrochemical analysis.

He studied the emissions from hot elements and together with Gustav Kirchhoff discovered two elements: cesium (in 1860 - currently used in atomic clocks) and rubidium in 1861.

Bunsen developed several methods for analyzing the composition of gases and was a pioneer in the field of photochemistry. He also carried out the first works in the field of organo-arsenic chemistry, together with his laboratory assistant Peter Sadaga he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement of the laboratory burners that were in use at the time. The Bunsen Kirchhoff Spectroscopy Prize is named after them.

The method he invented - they identified the spectrum lines of each element - today allows for a wide variety of applications, from identifying the composition of distant stars observed through a telescope to the optical identification of materials using a scanner or camera - for example, there are companies that use this for recycling without the residents having to separate the various materials, after disassembly The system goes through the waste into small pieces and examines the spectrum of each piece using the method developed by Bunsen and sorts it into its required place.

The explanation for the discovery is sufficient Bloomfield Science Museum website in Jerusalem. "The chemists discovered that different elements produce different colors when they burn. In 1859, Govtev Kirchhoff had a brilliant idea: to transmit this light through a prism. Together with Bunsen, he immediately discovered that the resulting spectrum has bright lines on a continuous background, that the line pattern is different for each of the chemical elements, and that some of these lines overlap the dark lines of the sun's (solar) spectrum.

Bunsen and Kirchhoff immediately realized the enormous implications of these discoveries, and began to exploit them. The pattern of the light lines created unique "fingerprints" for each element and element, in such a way that when we examined the spectrum of an unknown substance (for which only tiny amounts were required), it was possible to quickly identify the elements that make it up. Since then, the Bunsen and Kirchhoff spectroscope continues to be a central instrument in analytical chemistry."

In this way they identified, using the prototype of the spectroscope, the two discovered the spectrum of the elements sodium, lithium and potassium. After countless purifications in the laboratory, Bunsen was able to produce pure samples of substances thanks to the spectrum tests. He discovered the blue spectral lines in mineral water samples from Durkheim in Germany. He guessed that they indicate the existence of a chemical element that has not yet been discovered. After desalination of 40 tons of water, in the spring of 1860 he managed to isolate 17 grams of the new element and named it cesium after the Latin word for deep blue. He also identified rubidium a year later using the same process.

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