Question

What are the $17$ rare earth minerals?

Answer 1

Hint: Rare earth minerals are a group of $17$ soft heavy metals. They are spread across the periodic table as lanthanides. They are also called rare earth elements or rare metal oxides as many of them are typically sold as oxide compounds. They exhibit similar chemical properties.

Complete answer:
As mentioned earlier they are a group of $17$ elements. These are namely $lanthanum$ , $cerium$ , $promethium$ , $samarium$ , $europium$ , $gadolinium$ , $terbium$ , $dysprosium$ , $holmium$ , $erbium$ , $thulium$ , $ytterbium$ , $lutetium$ , $scandium$ and $yttrium$ . Although they are more abundant than their name implies, they are difficult and costly to mine and process cleanly.
They are located at the top of the extended rows of the periodic table. Most of these metals show trivalency but some of them also show different valancies. They are silvery-white or grey in colour. Due to their high conductivity they are used in superconductors. They are similar in different properties but they are used based on their unique properties. These rare earth metals occur naturally with the minerals. For example monazite is mixed with rare earth $phosphate$ .
The rare earth metals occur in very low concentration with their ores even though they are found in abundance. The most abundant rare earth metals is $cerium$ . It has average crustal abundances that are similar to commonly used industrial metals.

Note:
They are used in a variety of products like in mobile phones, electric car motors, military jet engines, satellites, lasers, fibre optics, wind turbines, televisions, superconductors and oil refineries. They have great use in defence equipment like antimissiles, satellites.