What is Osmium?
Osmium is a metallic chemical element in the platinum family. This element is quite rare, and it tends to be rather expensive as a result, making commercial applications for osmium rather limited. The metal tends to be used mostly in alloys, often in very small amounts to make metal stronger and durable without driving up the cost too much. The world’s major sources of this element are Turkey and Bulgaria, although it appears in small amounts in other regions as well; the element rarely appears in a pure form, but is rather combined with other metals in the form of ores. When osmium is isolated, it is an extremely hard silvery metal with a slightly blue cast and a hexagonal crystalline structure which is very tightly packed, making it an extremely dense element. Osmium is among the heaviest of elements, along with iridium, a close neighbor on the periodic table of elements. The atomic number of osmium is 76, and the metal is identified with the symbol Os on the periodic table. Osmium i
