The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City makes use of roughly 400,000 cubic toes of helium fuel in complete to inflate its iconic big balloons. Besides being lighter than air and nonflammable—therefore its practicality for balloons—helium is extremely helpful as a cooling agent for superconductive supplies, making it essential to many scientific and medical endeavors, together with MRI machines and particle accelerators just like the Large Hadron Collider. So are you able to measure an inflatable Snoopy or Pikachu within the quantity of science it might be used for?

Helium is without doubt one of the lightest and most plentiful parts within the universe, however on Earth, the availability is restricted. The fuel is usually collected as a byproduct in mining operations. You might have examine helium shortages within the current previous; in keeping with Phil Kornbluth, an skilled on the helium market, the pandemic considerably curtailed helium demand. In June 2020, Physics Today reported that, not like a number of years in the past, “researchers now report they have no trouble getting the helium they need.”

Global demand is now again up after falling throughout the pandemic, Kornbluth mentioned, although extraction tasks in Qatar and jap Russia imply that the subsequent six months can be a “long-term inflection point for helium supply” globally, with a everlasting improve in provide. So there’s no have to disgrace Macy’s for its once-a-year use of this beneficial fuel; “Macy’s is a drop in the bucket,” mentioned Kornbluth.

Though quantity varies among the many balloons—the Macy’s stars are 25 toes broad and tall, whereas the Dragon Ball Z Goku is 70 toes lengthy and 56 toes tall—on common every balloon is outwardly stuffed with about 12,000 cubic toes of helium, a widely cited figure. (15,000 cubic feet can be broadly cited. Macy’s didn’t reply to Gizmodo’s request for laborious numbers.) A normal celebration balloon accommodates about 0.4 cubic toes of helium, so that you’d want about 30,000 of them to method the quantity of helium utilized by a single Macy’s balloon.

Perhaps essentially the most important scientific use of helium is in medical applied sciences. Liquid helium is chilly sufficient that it makes magnets in MRI machines superconducting, permitting the units to take non-invasive, high-quality pictures of sentimental tissues inside your physique. Newer applied sciences enable for the reuse of the fuel (as a substitute of letting it boil off in Earth’s environment), however standard MRI machines use about 1,500 and 1,700 liters of liquid helium, an quantity that must be topped off periodically. Helium has completely different volumes in numerous states; 1 liter of liquid helium is equal to 26.63 cubic toes of the fuel at one environment of strain, according to one industrial gas supplier. That means, very roughly, that three Macy’s character balloons may present the helium for one MRI machine.

But there are non-medical makes use of of the fuel, too. Consider the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous physics experiment at CERN in Switzerland. All eight curved sections of the collider are cooled down with liquid helium. Accelerating and colliding matter may help physicists uncover new particles, just like the Higgs Boson in 2012. In 2014, it took 130 metric tons of liquid helium to chill down the whole accelerator; the helium arrived weekly by the truckload, according to Symmetry magazine.

Helium can be utilized in astrophysics. Like Macy’s, NASA makes use of helium to offer balloons raise, although NASA’s balloons ascend to a lot loftier heights. These balloons are used for astronomy, finding out Earth’s environment, and detecting high-energy radiation from house. In 2009, the company signed a five-year contract to spend $56.5 million for 12.5 million liters of liquid helium and 212 million cubic toes of gaseous helium, according to SpaceNews. The company can use as much as 100 million cubic toes of the fuel per yr, by its own measure. Helium can be used as a purge fuel in hydrogen programs, which means it’s wanted for rocket launches. Indeed, NASA is without doubt one of the world’s largest customers of helium, with out which lots of the company’s tasks actually couldn’t get off the bottom.

Since Macy’s started utilizing balloons for its parade, they’ve at all times contained helium besides as soon as, in 1958, when a helium scarcity required the corporate to resort to air-filled balloons, lifted down the avenues with cranes. Hopefully, fashionable shortages by no means get so dire.

More: The First Exoplanet Known to Contain Helium Is a Truly Alien World

Correction: A earlier model of this text said that helium is a superconductor; truly, it’s used to chill metals right down to superconducting temperatures. Thanks to commenter JimEmery for pointing this out.