It’s fireworks season, and there’s no better way to get a visual tour of the period table of elements than a fireworks show! Little balls or cubes called stars are made of various elements called stars and packed into shells with gun powder, and the chemicals in them determine both their color and the effects as they burn.

Want red? Strontium will do that. Magnesium will give you the brightest white you’ve ever seen. Copper burns blue and barium is green. If you want to design a unique color, combine them. A blue-violet color is a combination of copper, oxygen, and strontium.

And then there are the effects. Zinc will give you smoke, and aluminum gives a sparkler effect. Those bright silver sparkly ones are titanium, and the glitter effects at the end of many of them are antimony.

All of these behaviors are determined by the structure of the electrons in the atoms of these elements. It’s all chemistry!