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Abundance (atom fraction) of the chemical elements in Earth's upper continental crust as a function of atomic number; [5] siderophiles shown in yellow. Graphs of abundance against atomic number can reveal patterns relating abundance to stellar nucleosynthesis and geochemistry. The alternation of abundance between even and odd atomic number is ...
The abundance of the chemical elements is a measure of the occurrence of the chemical elements relative to all other elements in a given environment. Abundance is measured in one of three ways: by mass fraction (in commercial contexts often called weight fraction), by mole fraction (fraction of atoms by numerical count, or sometimes fraction of molecules in gases), or by volume fraction.
Plutonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is a silvery-gray actinide metal that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen.
Chemical elements may also be categorized by their origin on Earth, with the first 94 considered naturally occurring, while those with atomic numbers beyond 94 have only been produced artificially via human-made nuclear reactions. Of the 94 naturally occurring elements, 83 are considered primordial and either stable or weakly
Today, 118 elements are known, the first 94 of which are known to occur naturally on Earth at present. [10] [a] The remaining 24, americium to oganesson (95–118), occur only when synthesized in laboratories. Of the 94 naturally occurring elements, 83 are primordial and 11 occur only in decay
Thus, about two-thirds of stable elements occur naturally on Earth in multiple stable isotopes, with the largest number of stable isotopes for an element being ten, for tin (50 Sn). There are about 94 elements found naturally on Earth (up to plutonium inclusive), though some are detected only in very tiny amounts, such as plutonium-244.
Natural abundance. Relative abundance of elements in the Earth's upper crust. In physics, natural abundance (NA) refers to the abundance of isotopes of a chemical element as naturally found on a planet. The relative atomic mass (a weighted average, weighted by mole-fraction abundance figures) of these isotopes is the atomic weight listed for ...
Additionally, about 31 nuclides of the naturally occurring elements have unstable isotopes with a half-life larger than the age of the Solar System (~10 9 years or more). [b] An additional four nuclides have half-lives longer than 100 million years, which is far less than the age of the Solar System, but long enough for some of them to have ...