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
Stars named after people with them in some way. The second, somewhat more obscurely, are those named after an individual but without explicitly making this clear. There is a small group of stars whose common names honour individuals. Many of these were highly significant in some way when discovered, usually through having some unusual characteristic. Some stars were given names that were disguised names of individuals, which names subsequently appeared in star catalogues and thus into more general usage. The earliest noted example was Sualocin and Rotanev, which names have now been approved by the IAU WGSN (see above). More recently, during the Apollo