Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
The known elements form a set of atomic numbers, from the single-proton element hydrogen up to the 118-proton element oganesson. [58] All known isotopes of elements with atomic numbers greater than 82 are radioactive, although the radioactivity of element 83 ( bismuth ) is so slight as to be practically negligible.
A chemical element is a chemical substance whose atoms all have the same number of protons. The number of protons is called the atomic number of that element. For example, oxygen has an atomic number of 8, meaning each oxygen atom has 8 protons in its nucleus.
Each distinct atomic number therefore corresponds to a class of atom: these classes are called the chemical elements. [5] The chemical elements are what the periodic table classifies and organizes. Hydrogen is the element with atomic number 1; helium, atomic number 2; lithium, atomic number 3; and so on.
An element is a chemical substance made up of a particular kind of atom and hence cannot be broken down or transformed by a chemical reaction into a different element, though it can be transmuted into another element through a nuclear reaction.
A little more than three-quarters of naturally occurring elements exist as a mixture of isotopes (see monoisotopic elements), and the average isotopic mass of an isotopic mixture for an element (called the relative atomic mass) in a defined environment on Earth determines the element's standard atomic weight. Historically, it was these atomic ...
The most reactive kind of metallic element is an alkali metal of group 1 (e.g., sodium or potassium); this is because such an atom has only a single valence electron. During the formation of an ionic bond , which provides the necessary ionization energy , this one valence electron is easily lost to form a positive ion (cation) with a closed ...
The only possible motion of an atom in a monatomic gas is translation (electronic excitation is not important at room temperature). Thus by the equipartition theorem, the kinetic energy of a single atom of a monatomic gas at thermodynamic temperature T is given by , where k B is the Boltzmann constant.