Barium Barium Barium is a chemical element with symbol Ba and atomic number 56. It is the fifth element in group 2 and is a soft, silvery alkaline earth metal. Because of its high chemical reactivity, barium is never found in nature as a free element. Its hydroxide, known in pre-modern times as baryta, does not occur as a mineral, but can be prepared by heating barium carbonate. The most common naturally occurring minerals of barium are barite (now called baryte) (barium sulfate, BaSO) and witherite (barium carbonate, BaCO), both insoluble in water. The name "barium" originates from the alchemical derivative
Chemical equation a 2 before O, giving the balanced equation: This equation does not have any coefficients in front of CH and CO, since a coefficient of 1 is dropped. Generally, any chemical equation involving "J" different molecules can be written as: where "R" is the symbol for the "j-th" molecule, and ν is the stoichiometric coefficient for the "j-th" molecule, positive for products, negative for reactants (or vice versa). A properly balanced chemical equation will then obey: where the composition matrix "a" is the number of atoms of element "i" in molecule "j". Any vector which, when operated upon by the