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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.
This is a list of chemical elements and their atomic properties, ordered by atomic number (Z).. Since valence electrons are not clearly defined for the d-block and f-block elements, there not being a clear point at which further ionisation becomes unprofitable, a purely formal definition as number of electrons in the outermost shell has been used.
For each atom the subshells are given first in concise form, then with all subshells written out, followed by the number of electrons per shell. For phosphorus (element 15) as an example, the concise form is [Ne] 3s 2 3p 3. Here [Ne] refers to the core electrons which are the same as for the element neon (Ne), the last noble gas before ...
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 ...
Examples include the element carbon and the organic compounds. [98] The chemical elements are often displayed in a periodic table that is laid out to display recurring chemical properties, and elements with the same number of valence electrons form a group that is aligned in the same column of the table. (The horizontal rows correspond to the ...
Atoms will gain or lose electrons depending on which action takes the least energy. For example, a sodium atom, Na, has a single electron in its valence shell, surrounding 2 stable, filled inner shells of 2 and 8 electrons. Since these filled shells are very stable, a sodium atom tends to lose its extra electron and attain this stable ...
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.