Madeleine Finlay

Helium is a very special element that we use in loads of different applications, and that's because helium has some very special properties.

So if you imagine the periodic table in front of you, helium sits at the top right-hand side above the rest of the noble gases like neon and argon.

It being a noble gas means that it's inert, so it basically doesn't interact or react with anything else.

Famously, it's lighter than air, it floats, but it's also non-flammable and that's why it's used often in airships.

It also happens to have the lowest boiling point of all the elements, which means that it stays in its gas form at atmospheric pressures to just a few degrees above zero Kelvin, which is absolute zero.

And it can stay a liquid all the way down.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's used to cool all different kinds of scientific equipment, particularly for studying quantum phenomena like superconductivity.

And it's actually used for cooling superconducting magnets and coils at the particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

But science is really just a small part of the helium market.

Hospital equipment is the biggest.

That's MRI machines.

But, you know, it's used in the aerospace industry.

It's used in welding, in deep sea diving to manage how much nitrogen and oxygen is received through the tanks.

And one of the key industries at the moment, actually, is the semiconducting chip production that powers all of this new artificial intelligence.

That depends on helium as well.

So you can imagine that experts believe that demand for helium is going to keep on growing.

There are two places that helium is made.

The first is inside stars, like our sun, with nuclear fusion.

And as helium is the second lightest element after hydrogen, it's also the second most abundant element in the universe, as far as we know.