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Sodium is a chemical element; it has symbol Na (from Neo-Latin natrium) and atomic number 11. It is a soft, silvery-white, highly reactive metal. Sodium is an alkali metal, being in group 1 of the periodic table. Its only stable isotope is 23 Na. The free metal does not occur in nature and must be prepared from compounds.
Sodium atoms have 11 electrons, one more than the stable configuration of the noble gas neon. As a result, sodium usually forms ionic compounds involving the Na + cation. [1] Sodium is a reactive alkali metal and is much more stable in ionic compounds. It can also form intermetallic compounds and organosodium compounds.
Here [Ne] refers to the core electrons which are the same as for the element neon (Ne), the last noble gas before phosphorus in the periodic table. The valence electrons (here 3s 2 3p 3) are written explicitly for all atoms. Electron configurations of elements beyond hassium (element 108) have never been measured; predictions are used below.
In chemistry and atomic physics, an electron shell may be thought of as an orbit that electrons follow around an atom's nucleus.The closest shell to the nucleus is called the "1 shell" (also called the "K shell"), followed by the "2 shell" (or "L shell"), then the "3 shell" (or "M shell"), and so on further and further from the nucleus.
118 chemical elements have been identified and named officially by IUPAC.A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z).
A particularly striking example of an alkalide is "inverse sodium hydride", H + Na − (both ions being complexed), as opposed to the usual sodium hydride, Na + H −: [79] it is unstable in isolation, due to its high energy resulting from the displacement of two electrons from hydrogen to sodium, although several derivatives are predicted to ...
The electrons are negatively charged, and this opposing charge is what binds them to the nucleus. If the numbers of protons and electrons are equal, as they normally are, then the atom is electrically neutral as a whole. If an atom has more electrons than protons, then it has an overall negative charge and is called a negative ion (or anion ...
Lithium has two electrons in the 1s-subshell and one in the (higher-energy) 2s-subshell, so its configuration is written 1s 2 2s 1 (pronounced "one-s-two, two-s-one"). Phosphorus (atomic number 15) is as follows: 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6 3s 2 3p 3. For atoms with many electrons, this notation can become lengthy and so an abbreviated notation is used.