I have a basic understanding of it. But mostly just from what I learned in high school. Also some from watching Periodic Videos on YouTube. Eli5: But why are there radioactive and other dangerous elements?
In: Chemistry
All elements are made up of what are called protons and electrons. Electrons love protons and they will try and get as close to electrons as they can. You’d might think that this would lead them to flying straight to any near by proton, but that doesn’t happen. You see, Electrons really hate other electrons. Like really really hate. They will stay as far away as possible. So they want to go towards protons, but they can’t because other electrons are also trying to. Instead they maintain a distance from the proton, so that they can still be close to the proton, but far away from other electrons.
Because of all that the more protons you get in one place, the more electrons they will attract. Now imagine one proton and one electron. Obviously if an electron comes from the other direction it can get close to that proton without getting close to the electron. Because of this electrons will naturally fill up the space they can find around an electron. The farther away from the proton they are the more electrons they can fit at that distance.
Because of this the amount of additional electrons the atom can take, and the shapes they from change a lot as more protons collect in one place. Because of this different amounts of protons will have very different properties. So we call those different number of protons elements. If you look at a periodic table the atomic number of the element is it’s number of protons.
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