This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: What do you see when you look up at the night sky? While everyone may have a different answer, the truth is that almost everything out there is hydrogen.
The first element in the periodic table is by far the most abundant substance in the cosmos. It's the fuel of stars and the raw material from which the heavier elements were forged over billions of years. Even the sun is, at its core, a furnace for fusing hydrogen atoms together.
Despite this abundance, the hydrogen atom has been almost completely inaccessible in the chemistry lab for over a century. It's a strange irony; physicists have explored the hydrogen atom for as long as modern science has existed. In fact, the hydrogen atom is the most studied and well-understood system in the history of physics.
Take Niels Bohr's famous model of atomic structure—it was built on the hydrogen atom. Erwin Schrödinger solved his famous quantum wave equation for it first. And when Paul Dirac merged quantum mechanics, the theory of particles and atoms, with Albert Einstein's special relativity, it revealed a lot of the fine structure of the element.
For synthetic chemists, who build chemical compounds and molecules, it has been almost out of reach—until now. To be clear, I'm not talking about the hydrogen molecule that comes in a gas canister, which consists of two hydrogen atoms bound together. And I'm not talking about the hydrogen ion (which has an extra electron) or the proton (a particle which makes up the atomic nucleus of the hydrogen atom).
What I am talking about is the lone, simple hydrogen atom: a single electron orbiting a single proton. This single, unpaired electron makes it what chemists call a radical: the most fundamental reactive species in all of chemistry. Until recently, generating it required conditions so extreme that it was simply not a tool synthetic chemists could use.
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