Nebulium

Nebulium was a proposed element found in astronomical observation of a nebula by William Huggins in 1864. The strong green emission lines of the Cat's Eye Nebula, discovered using spectroscopy, led to the postulation that an as yet unknown element was responsible for this emission. In 1927, Ira Sprague Bowen showed that the lines are emitted by doubly ionized oxygen (O²⁺), and no new element was necessary to explain them.

William Hyde Wollaston in 1802 and Joseph von Fraunhofer in 1814 described the dark lines within the solar spectrum. Later, Gustav Kirchhoff explained the lines by atomic absorption or emission, which allowed the lines to be used for the identification of chemical elements.

In the early days of telescopic astronomy, the word nebula was used to describe any fuzzy patch of light that did not look like a star. Many of these, such as the Andromeda Nebula, had spectra that looked like stellar spectra, and these turned out to be galaxies. Others, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula, had very different spectra. When William Huggins looked at the Cat's Eye, he found no continuous spectrum like that seen in the Sun, but just a few strong emission lines. The two green lines at 495.9 nm and 500.7 nm were the strongest. These lines did not correspond to any known elements on Earth. The fact that helium had been identified by the emission lines in the Sun in 1868, and had then also been found on Earth in 1895, encouraged astronomers to suggest that the lines were due to a new element. The name nebulium (occasionally nebulum or nephelium) was first mentioned by the wife of Huggins in a short communication in 1898, although it is stated that Huggins occasionally used the term before.

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