The name is from the Greek for fire: struck against steel it throws sparks, and it fired the wheellock guns of the sixteenth century. Gold is soft and streaks yellow; pyrite is brittle and streaks greenish black. In the structure the sulfur atoms come in pairs, bonded to each other, and iron sits between the pairs in the same arrangement as the sodium and chlorine in halite.
Research Elements Compound · FeS2 One unit cell, the smallest block that repeats in every direction to build the whole crystal. Atoms on its faces, edges and corners are shared with the neighboring cells. Farther atoms are drawn fainter. Atom positions from the Crystallography Open Database entry 9000594 (Bayliss, P., 1977). The most common sulfide mineral: in hydrothermal veins, in coal seams and black shales, in massive sulfide deposits like Rio Tinto in Spain, and as a trace in most rocks. The perfect brassy cubes in museums come from Navajún in La Rioja, where they grew in a marl bed. Its color and shine earned it the name fool's gold. For centuries pyrite was mined for its sulfur, roasted to sulfur dioxide and made into sulfuric acid, above all at Rio Tinto and Tharsis in Spain. Today most sulfur is recovered from oil and gas, so pyrite is mined for the gold and copper it carries, and otherwise is waste rock that must be kept from the air and rain, because it weathers to sulfuric acid and stains streams below old mines orange.Pyrite
Elements
Crystal structure
Cell: a = b = c = 5.4166 Å, all angles 90°
Space group: P a -3Where it's found
How it's mined
Notes