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Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.

Anne Marie's Chemistry Blog

By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., About.com Guide to Chemistry

Sulfur Pentafluoride: The Color of Love... and Death

Friday November 13, 2009
Here's a cute cartoon to brighten your day. Sulfur pentafluoride presumably binds with itself to make disulfur decafluoride, a chemical warfare pulmonary agent similar to your good old friend phosgene. Fun stuff. Disulfur decafluoride eventually decomposes into sulfur hexafluoride (which can be used as a sort of anti-helium in gas density demonstrations) and sulfur tetrafluoride (which reacts with moisture in the air to form sulfurous acid and hydrofluoric acid). Incidentally, while I have no idea about the color of sulfur pentafluoride, I can tell you disulfur decafluoride is colorless and one breath can kill you in a day. It takes a while because its actually the acids produced by the sulfur tetrafluoride reacting with water that likely do you in.

Comments

November 15, 2009 at 11:56 pm
(1) Chris Lee says:

According to http://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/25066 it’s a colorless gas, and toxic in it’s own right.

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