Do Magnetic Solids exhibit their Magnetic properties in their Gaseous state? Example
Does cobalt, a solid exhibit Magnetic properties when converted to its Gaseous State.
 A: I assume the magnetic property you're thinking of is ferromagnetism. If so then no, a gas of cobalt atoms would not be ferromagnetic.
If you take a single cobalt atom you'll find it has a magnetic moment i.e. it behaves like a tiny magnet. This is because the cobalt atom contains unpaired electrons, and there are lots of atoms like this. However if you take two bar magnets and let them come together you'll find they naturally arrange themselves like this:

Because the North and South poles attract the two magnets line up anti-parallel and their magnetic fields cancel out. So if you took a million bar magnets and jumbled them all up together they would pair up and cancel out and the overall magnetic field would be very small.
Atoms that have a magnetic moment behave in a very similar way. For example the aluminium atom has one unpaired electron so it has a magnetic moment. However in aluminium metal the atoms arrange themselves with their magnetic moments aligned anti-parallel like the diagram above, and aluminium metal has no overall magnetic field. We call materials like this paramagnetic.
However for a very few materials called ferromagnets there is an extra interaction between the electrons in neighbouring atoms called an exchange interaction that makes the magnetic moments line up in parallel rather than anti-parallel, so they look like:

In ferromagnets the magnetic moments of the individual atoms line and reinforce each other, and that gives the material the large overall magnetic field that we get in a bar magnet.
But this exchange interaction is highly dependent on the exact details of the crystal structure i.e. the way the atoms are positioned relative to each other. As soon as you destroy the crystal structure by melting or vaporising the material the exchange interaction disappears and the material reverts to being just paramagnetic with no large overall magnetic field.
So the bottom line is that molten or gaseous cobalt would be paramagnetic not ferromagnetic. It would still have some interesting magnetic properties, but it wouldn't have a strong overall magnetic field like a ferromagnet.
