Palladium Palladium Palladium is a chemical element with symbol Pd and atomic number 46. It is a rare and lustrous silvery-white metal discovered in 1803 by William Hyde Wollaston. He named it after the asteroid Pallas, which was itself named after the epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, acquired by her when she slew Pallas. Palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium form a group of elements referred to as the platinum group metals (PGMs). These have similar chemical properties, but palladium has the lowest melting point and is the least dense of them. More than half the supply of palladium
Group 3 element salts, he named it from the Ancient Greek "λανθάνειν" [lanthanein] (lit. "to lie hidden"). Relatively pure lanthanum metal was first isolated in 1923. Lutetium was independently discovered in 1907 by French scientist Georges Urbain, Austrian mineralogist Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach, and American chemist Charles James as an impurity in the mineral ytterbia, which was thought by most chemists to consist entirely of ytterbium. Welsbach proposed the names "cassiopeium" for element 71 (after the constellation Cassiopeia) and "aldebaranium" (after the star Aldebaran) for the new name of ytterbium but these naming proposals were rejected, although many German scientists in the