Why is nitrogen colorless

Uses of Nitrogen. Nitrogen finds use in diverse commercial applications, including:. Chemical Processing Petroleum Recovery and Refining Controlling VOC emissions helps refiners comply with U. Clean Air Act requirements. Nitrogen is essential to life on Earth. It is a component of all proteins, and it can be found in all living systems.

Nitrogen compounds are present in organic materials, foods, fertilizers, explosives and poisons. Nitrogen is crucial to life, but in excess it can also be harmful to the environment. Named after the Greek word nitron , for "native soda," and genes for "forming," nitrogen is the fifth most abundant element in the universe.

On the other hand, the atmosphere of Mars is only 2. In its gas form, nitrogen is colorless, odorless and generally considered as inert. In its liquid form, nitrogen is also colorless and odorless, and looks similar to water, according to Los Alamos. Nitrogen was discovered in by chemist and physician Daniel Rutherford, when he removed oxygen and carbon dioxide from air, demonstrating that the residual gas would not support living organisms or combustion, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Compounds of nitrogen are found in foods, explosives, poisons, and fertilizers. Nitrogen makes up DNA in the form of nitrogenous bases as well as in neurotransmitters. It is one of the largest industrial gases, and is produced commercially as a gas and a liquid.

For many years during the 's and 's scientists hinted that there was another gas in the atmosphere besides carbon dioxide and oxygen. It was not until the 's that scientists could prove there was in fact another gas that took up mass in the atmosphere of the Earth. Discovered in by Daniel Rutherford and independently by others such as Priestly and Cavendish who was able to remove oxygen and carbon dioxide from a contained tube full of air.

He showed that there was residual gas that did not support combustion like oxygen or carbon dioxide. While his experiment was the one that proved that nitrogen existed, other experiments were also going in London where they called the substance "burnt" or "dephlogisticated air". Nitrogen is the fourth most abundant element in humans and it is more abundant in the known universe than carbon or silicon.

Most commercially produced nitrogen gas is recovered from liquefied air. Nitrogen has two naturally occurring isotopes, nitrogen and nitrogen, which can be separated with chemical exchanges or thermal diffusion. Nitrogen also has isotopes with 12, 13, 16, 17 masses, but they are radioactive. These two compounds are formed by decomposing organic matter that has potassium or sodium present and are often found in fertilizers and byproducts of industrial waste. Most nitrogen compounds have a positive Gibbs free energy i.

This triple bond is difficult hard to break. For dinitrogen to follow the octet rule, it must have a triple bond. Nitrogen has a total of 5 valence electrons, so doubling that, we would have a total of 10 valence electrons with two nitrogen atoms. The octet requires an atom to have 8 total electrons in order to have a full valence shell, therefore it needs to have a triple bond.

The compound is also very inert, since it has a triple bond. Some of the trapped nitrogen is returned to the air as bacteria in soil decompose the nitrogen compounds and release the element back into its gaseous form.

Humans breath nitrogen in and out of their lungs all the time, without any serious side effects. The nitrogen gas dissolves slightly in the blood and circulates around the body harmlessly. Under pressure however, such as when a person dives into deep water, the amount dissolved nitrogen increases. If the decompression is slow and careful, the dissolved nitrogen comes out of the body fluids and can be removed through the lungs, but, if decompression is too rapid, the 'bends' causes great pain and even death.