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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.
The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, is an ordered arrangement of the chemical elements into rows (" periods ") and columns (" groups "). It is an icon of chemistry and is widely used in physics and other sciences. It is a depiction of the periodic law, which states that when the elements are arranged in order ...
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
The synthetic elements are those with atomic numbers 95–118, as shown in purple on the accompanying periodic table: [ 1 ] these 24 elements were first created between 1944 and 2010. The mechanism for the creation of a synthetic element is to force additional protons into the nucleus of an element with an atomic number lower than 95.
McMillan and Abelson found that 239 93 itself undergoes beta decay and must produce an isotope of element 94, but the quantities they used were not enough to isolate and identify element 94 along with 93. [176] Natural traces were found in Belgian Congo pitchblende by D. F. Peppard et al. in 1952. [177] 85 Astatine: 1940
Of the 94 naturally occurring chemical elements, 61 are listed in the table above. Of the remaining 33, it is not known how many occur in the human body. Most of the elements needed for life are relatively common in the Earth's crust.
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 ...
Contents. Biological roles of the elements. A large fraction of the chemical elements that occur naturally on the Earth's surface are essential to the structure and metabolism of living things. Four of these elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen) are essential to every living thing and collectively make up 99% of the mass of ...