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HeliumHelium is the second-lightest element in the universe and the second most abundant, accounting for about one-quarter of all visible matter by mass. The bulk of helium was formed in the moments after the Big Bang, but it has since been produced in the cores of about 90% of stars by fusing hydrogen. In fact, helium is named after the Greek god of the sun—Helios—after it was identified in 1868 via a then-unfamiliar spectral signature in sunlight. Like other noble gases, helium has a complete outermost shell of electrons around its nucleus, making it largely chemically unreactive. This property makes it an invaluable shield in chemically sensitive processes, such as semiconductor fabrication, fiber optic manufacturing, and arc welding. Because it remains liquid at extremely low temperatures, helium is used as a coolant for superconducting magnets in various scientific equipment, including MRI scanners and particle accelerators. Famously, it also provides buoyancy for weather and party balloons alike and changes one's voice if breathed in. Beneath Earth's surface, underground deposits of helium produced by radioactive elements can be harvested during natural gas extraction. However, because of its lightness, any that escapes to Earth's atmosphere gets lost to space, contributing to its status as a nonrenewable resource.Explore Helium

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As of 2025, the US and Qatar dominate global helium productionThe US's 42.6% share includes helium imported from Canada and refined within the states. Geopolitical conflicts can cause supply disruptions that impact several advanced technologies, including semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace systems, and medical imaging. Visual Capitalist How helium greatly improves the efficiency of barcode-scanning lasersRather than directly energizing neon atoms, electrical discharge at lower, more practical power levels can excite helium atoms to energy levels nearly equal to those in neon atoms. Within a helium-neon laser, these gases are present in a 10-to-1 ratio, enabling helium to efficiently transfer energy to neon, which is then discharged as red light. PhysicsOpenLab View a step-by-step breakdown of how helium is forged in stars alongside antimatterDuring the proton-proton chain, four hydrogen nuclei—protons—are fused together to create an alpha particle—a helium nucleus—and produce the energy that supports a star's own weight. Through radioactive decay, two of these protons become neutrons, with each releasing an antielectron, or positron, and an electron neutrino. HyperPhysics Why trying to freeze helium creates a fluid that can travel through solids and climb wallsOnce cooled to temperatures just above 2 Kelvin, helium-4 atoms begin to exhibit superfluidity, a quantum property in which all atoms collectively inhabit the same low-energy state and behave in perfect unison. This coordination removes the internal friction that causes liquids to cling to surfaces, allowing them to slide through microscopic pores and scale container walls. SciShow Why space resource extraction companies are racing to harvest lunar heliumWithout a magnetic field to deflect it away, helium-3 from solar wind has accumulated on the lunar surface over billions of years in significant quantities. With a reported value of $20M per kilogram because of its potential use in clean nuclear fusion, harvesting of helium-3 may form the basis of a future lunar economy. CNET How helium turns the Large Hadron Collider into the world's largest cryogenic systemAcross three stages, five "cryogenic islands," and weeks of cooling, 36,000 metric tons of magnets are successively brought down to temperatures colder than outer space using a closed liquid helium system. Helium continues to circulate during the collider's operation to maintain the magnets' temperature and the transmission of electrical current with zero resistance. CERN A visit to the Federal Helium Reserve, which once supplied up to 30% of US heliumThe underground storage facility in Amarillo, Texas, was established by the Helium Act in 1925, when helium was viewed as a strategic resource whose export could enable other nations to use it for military airships. The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 instructed the Department of the Interior to begin selling off the facility and reserve, with the final sale occurring in 2024. Tom Scott Why the ratios of helium isotopes are analyzed to investigate ocean circulationVolcanic activity on the seafloor produces high ratios of helium-3 to helium-4, which can be tracked in ocean samples more easily than other elements because helium is nonreactive. Water from deep ocean currents can also be distinguished from air-exposed surface water sources by comparing these ratios, since atmospheric helium ratios are much lower. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Why helium mixtures are used in respiratory medicineUnlike the air near Earth's surface, which is primarily composed of oxygen and nitrogen, heliox is composed entirely of oxygen and helium. Because helium is lighter than nitrogen, the lungs do not have to work as hard to push air, easing the uptake of oxygen via a ventilator, mask, or nasal tube. Cleveland Clinic The industrial methods for recovering helium, including filters and cryogenic separationMembranes with microscopic pores of varying sizes can be used to selectively filter out components of natural gas, including helium, which can then be concentrated. Because helium requires the lowest temperature of all elements to condense into a liquid, extracted natural gas can also be cooled until only helium remains as a gas. North American Helium Learn how helium is used in the US, the world's largest producer of the noble gasAbout 44% of the global supply comes from the US, as much as the next two biggest producers—Qatar and Russia—combined. According to the US Geological Survey, more than half of this helium is used in scientific and engineering equipment (22%), non-welding-related manufacturing and fabrication (17%), and as a lifting agent (17%). Reuters View a ranking of the countries with the largest helium reserves, led by the USEstimated at 20.6 billion cubic meters (727.5 billion cubic feet) as of 2022, US helium reserves are more than double those of Qatar, the second nation on the list. Leading the world in natural gas production, from which helium is recovered, the US also leads global helium production, which helps mitigate shortages resulting from overseas geopolitical tensions. Visual Capitalist Why breathing helium, sulfur hexafluoride, and other gases changes your voiceThe speed of sound varies depending on the properties of the material it travels through, including its density. Because helium is less dense than air, sound travels faster, altering the timbre of one's voice to be squeakier by enhancing its higher frequencies. In molecules that are heavier than air, low-frequency sounds are enhanced, producing a deeper voice. Insider Science Why helium helped preserve the US' founding documents, but was later replacedIn 1951, the Charters of Freedom were stored in glass and metal cases filled with helium, which would not chemically react with the documents. After microscopic cracks were identified in the glass through which helium could leak out of and—experts feared—pollutants could infiltrate, new encasements made of aluminum, titanium, and argon replaced the old system in 2003. NIST Why stories about helium 'running out' indicate market volatility rather than scarcityOnly a few locations on Earth contain natural gas reserves with sufficiently high helium concentrations to make their extraction commercially viable, and geopolitical conflicts in these areas significantly affect helium production. This makes cost a major impediment to helium availability, particularly for scientific research, amid growing demand and ongoing depletion of reserves that took billions of years to form. Short Wave Helium formation, from radioactive decay inside Earth to nuclear fusion within stellar coresOver the course of billions of years, uranium and thorium undergo alpha decay, producing helium nuclei—two protons and two neutrons—which become helium atoms after gaining two electrons. This helium becomes trapped in underground reservoirs along with other gases and can be recovered during natural gas extraction. Chemistry in its Element How scientists discovered helium from sunlight over a decade before seeing it on EarthIn 1868, using tools that dispersed light into its constituent colors like a prism, astronomers Pierre Jules César Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer independently identified a bright yellow line in the solar spectrum that didn't match any known element. Fourteen years later, amid continued skepticism over the existence of a new element, the same spectral signature was observed in lava on Earth. Science History Institute The properties of helium, which has the lowest boiling point of any elementThe colorless, odorless, mainly unreactive element condenses from a gas into a liquid at -268.928 degrees Celsius (-452.07 degrees Fahrenheit)—near the lowest theoretically possible temperature—allowing it to serve as a liquid coolant in machines without the risk of causing damage as a solid. Royal Society of Chemistry An overview of helium, the nonrenewable resource that's lighter than airThe second element in the periodic table naturally forms deep underground over the course of billions of years through the decay of radioactive elements, but it is used and lost to space at rates faster than it is generated. Because of this and its extensive applications in scientific technologies, scientists continue to seek avenues for its exploration, storage, and recycling. National Geographic How helium enables MRI machines to look inside organismsBy cooling the machine's magnets with liquid helium to extremely low temperatures, they can generate and maintain powerful magnetic fields that align the hydrogen atoms in living things to point toward a patient's head or feet. A radio pulse nudges these atoms, which realign and induce a measurable signal in nearby electrical coils. These signals are captured in slices and then stacked into a 3D reconstruction. Real Engineering Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered stars are mostly made of hydrogen and heliumAt 25, her doctoral thesis challenged the then-common belief that stars were composed similarly to Earth. Several years later, Henry Norris Russell, who had initially dismissed her findings, independently made the same discovery and received credit for it. Science News Why Earth will be made uninhabitable by the sun far sooner than when the sun diesThe star has enough fuel to continue fusing hydrogen into helium for another 5 billion years, but the gradual increase in core temperature from these reactions will brighten the sun by 10% every billion years. Some models predict that the increased radiation will be enough to vaporize all of Earth's surface water about 1 billion years from now, long before the sun becomes a red giant and disintegrates the planet. The Conversation View the composition of the universe, dominated by dark energy and dark matterAbout 95% of the observable universe is made of substances whose composition is unknown, but most of what remains (4%) is in the form of clouds of hydrogen and helium, followed by gases and plasma within stars (0.5%) and neutrinos created in nuclear reactions (0.3%). Visual Capitalist How specialized oxygen mixtures like heliox enable deep diving without feeling drunkBeyond a depth of about 30 meters (98 feet), if divers are breathing surface air, which is about 78% nitrogen, underwater pressure forces more nitrogen into the bloodstream and induces nitrogen narcosis, whose symptoms resemble alcohol intoxication. Through saturation diving, where nitrogen is replaced with helium—an inert gas—deep divers can maintain cognitive function while working for extended periods. Atlas Obscura View the most expensive materials on Earth, led by those forged in particle acceleratorsCalifornium-252—valued at $27.8M per gram, as of 2025—is far rarer and more valuable than gold, silver, or diamonds due to production and transportation costs. The most expensive substance ever found or created is antimatter, costing approximately $62.5T per gram. BBC Science Focus Magazine How neutron stars resemble Earth, including harboring an atmosphere and 'mountains'These stars maintain an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, and carbon at approximately 2,000,000 degrees Celsius (3,600,000 degrees Fahrenheit), only a few thousandths of a millimeter thick, which envelops "mountains" about a millimeter high. Its interior consists of an inner and an outer crust surrounding inner and outer cores, all held together by enormous gravitational forces despite spinning multiple times a second. BBC Sky at Night Magazine Why Earth's atmosphere constantly loses the universe's lightest elements to spaceThe masses of hydrogen and helium are too small for these gases to be held by Earth's gravitational force, particularly when these atoms are given energy from collisions with high-speed particles from the sun. Although the planet loses a meter-wide balloon's worth of hydrogen every second, it will still take billions of years to exhaust the planet of this element. MinuteEarth Beyond oil, the Iran war is pushing up costs on fertilizer, prescriptions, and mortgages, tooGas is up 27% since fighting began, but the Strait of Hormuz also carries a third of the world's fertilizer, petrochemicals used in generic drugs, and helium for semiconductor manufacturing. Mortgage rates have climbed back above 6.4%, and economists warn $130 oil could tip the U.S. into recession. Investopedia Fusion reactions and radioactive decay produce elements inside starsHydrogen, present since the early universe, serves as fuel for the proton-proton chain, producing helium, which is then incorporated into the CNO cycle to produce carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Additional fusions of helium with these elements and subsequent decays via the alpha ladder produce elements up to iron and bismuth. Astronomy Magazine In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon.The "Balloon Boy" event received coverage from news outlets, and a search began after his parents claimed he was trapped inside his balloon. Later that day, the boy emerged from his attic where he had been hiding the whole time. His parents were later accused of orchestrating a hoax. TIME The observable universe has a mass of 100 sexdecillion kilogramsThe amount of visible matter in the universe is most accurately determined by measuring the cosmic microwave background. Quantities of dark matter and dark energy are calculated through the observed bending of light around galaxies and the expansion of the universe, respectively. Astronomy Magazine Temperatures colder than Pluto can allow electricity to flow resistance-freeSince its discovery in 1911, applications of superconductivity have made MRI machines and maglev trains possible due to quantum effects at extreme temperatures. These effects are modeled as electrons cooperating in pairs and flowing more efficiently. National MagLab Santa Barbara divers helped innovate deepwater diving technologyDivers in the Santa Barbara channel innovated a more efficient type of diving helmet in the 1960s that used helium to allow for longer, deeper excursions for oil surveying, abalone collecting, and more. These innovators have since set the standard worldwide for military and industrial diving. Deepwater Diving Some stars take longer to form than the current age of the universeThe first stars only burned for millions of years, providing the universe's first heavy elements. Some in the current population will burn for trillions of years, delaying the appearance of black dwarfs and other exotic cold stars. Smithsonian Magazine More than 90% of the atoms in the human body were forged by starsExcluding all of the universe's hydrogen and most of its helium and lithium that formed in the Big Bang, elements found in significant amounts in our bodies formed through nuclear fusion within stars, collisions between neutron stars, or stars undergoing supernova. For example, all of the oxygen (65% of our mass) came from massive stars exploding. NASA How do we know what the universe is made of?We've never been to any other planets or stars, but scientists claim to know with a high degree of certainty what elements they and other celestial bodies are made of. Key to this knowledge is the science of spectroscopy, which analyzes the light they emit to identify chemical composition. Extraordinary Universe Years of handling, copying, and light exposure have caused heavy deterioration of the original Declaration of IndependenceHandwritten in gallnut ink and signed in August 1776, the Declaration endured rough handling, repeated copy attempts, and decades of exposure to air and light—leaving it heavily faded and even marked by a mysterious handprint that appeared in the early 20th century. Popular Mechanics IBM Quantum’s dilution refrigerators keep quantum processors colder than spaceIn IBM’s quantum lab, quantum processors are kept at a temperature of 15 millikelvin using dilution refrigerators. These refrigerators use nested thermal layers, cryogens like liquid nitrogen and helium, and powerful compressors to maintain the ultra-cold temperatures required for qubit stability and performance. Qiskit Webb's sunshield enables extreme cooling for precision space observationTo avoid interference from its own heat, the telescope uses a five-layer shield to stay ultra-cold and stable, allowing its instruments to function at cryogenic temperatures. One instrument, MIRI, gets so cold it needs a helium-powered cooler to reach just 7 Kelvin, or -447°F. NASA What fuels the sun?The sun is our biggest source of heat and light, but how does this massive powerhouse continue to produce such amazing energy? Basically, it's a fusion reactor. At its core the sun produces all that solar energy through hydrogen fusing and converting into helium, over and over again. Learn more about the entire amazing and explosive process here. Universe Today The Big Bang theory explains the expanding universe and its fiery early originsThe term “Big Bang” was initially coined by a skeptic of the theory, but the name stuck despite the theory not depicting a "bang." The event took place everywhere in the universe at once, and the theory explains the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe. Symmetry Magazine An interactive look at Neptune, the distant planetDark, cold, and whipped by supersonic winds, Neptune is a gas giant made of hydrogen, helium, ammonia, and methane, and was the first planet discovered through mathematics rather than direct observation. It's also the smallest of the gas planets on the periphery of the solar system. Learn more about the last planet in the solar system through the NASA site. NASA

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