Brimstone (sulfur)

What does it look like?

Image generated by the VESTA (Visualisation for Electronic and STructual analysis) software http://jp-minerals.org/vesta/en/

What is it?

When engulfed in fire and brimstone, have you ever wondered what brimstone actually is? Well in this context it’s referring to sulfur – with all the negative connotations that this yellow, smelly substance has. We’ve already featured one allotropes of sulfur, the S10 rings. But as we explained back then sulfur is probably the element with the most different ways of packing itself in a crystal structure – many have been discovered so far!
Many of the sulfur structures are composed of rings of sulfur atoms – today’s is no exception to this. Instead of rings of 10 sulfur atoms, here we have the more common form rings of 8 atoms.

Where did the structure come from?

This structure we’ve featured today is that of alpha-sulfur, which was first reported by Coppens et al, we obtained the CIF (which is hosted on the Inorganic crystal structure database) through the chemical data service (CDS) links on this page.

The crystal structure rainbow – Yellow sulfur

What does it look like?

Cyclodecasulfur, Image generated by the VESTA (Visualisation for Electronic and STructual analysis) software http://jp-minerals.org/vesta/en/

What is it?

Io, a picture taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

Another element of colour and perhaps not such a surprising inclusion in our Rainbow series is sulfur.  Sulfur really stands out as the element with the most currently known allotropes, standing at 30 currently.  Like carbon can come in graphite, diamond and buckyballs, the different structures of sulfur are contrasted by the rings that the sulfur atoms can from.  There has been observations of 6, 7 and even 16 member rings making up the basis of the large number of allotropes.  A ring ten of sulfur atoms (cyclodecasulfur) which we’ve chose to feature was discovered in 1968.  This large range of sulfur compound could be the explanation for the large range of yellows we see on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io.     

Where did the structure come from?

We’ve taken the structure of cyclodecasulfur from the work by Steudel et al. and it is number # 9012362 in the open crystallography database