Helium was found on the Sun before anyone found it on Earth
The only element ever discovered in space first: spotted as a mystery yellow line in the Sun's glare in 1868, decades before a sample existed on Earth.
During a total solar eclipse on 18 August 1868, the French astronomer Pierre Janssen trained a spectroscope on the Sun’s edge and saw a bright yellow line that matched no known element. In England, Norman Lockyer recorded the same line and concluded it belonged to something new.
Lockyer named it helium, from the Greek helios (sun), because it had only ever been detected in the Sun’s corona. It remains the first and only element identified beyond Earth before it was found here.
For over twenty years no helium turned up on Earth, and Lockyer was mocked for his mythical element.
The doubt ended in 1895, when the chemist William Ramsay isolated helium gas from a uranium-bearing mineral treated with acid. A faint line in sunlight had announced, 27 years early, the existence of what we now know is the second most abundant element in the universe.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
