why does a single molecule of argon gas only contains 1 argon atom while other gases such as nitrogen contain 2 of their respective atoms?
In: Chemistry
It’s because atom is not the unit of a material, you maybe have a misconception of what an atom is.
It’s a bit difficult to grasp, but the atom is a unit of the element itself. Like, one nitrogen atom is the smallest unit of nitrogen you can imagine. The problem is that most atoms don’t like to exist alone. Just because you can imagine a single atom of nitrogen, it doesn’t mean that it is stable in real world conditions.
So what atoms actually do if they find themselves in single -atomic state (which can happen for a short time), is that they stick together with other available atoms to form molecules. A molecule is basically several atoms stuck together. It may be two or more identical atoms (like two nitrogens) but may as well be different atoms such as nitrogen and oxygen to form various nitrogen oxides.
So these molecules are the units of actual material. Unlike atoms, molecules can stably exist.
Now how the atom exactly behaves when it somehow turns into single atomic stage, depends on the atom’s properties. Interestingly enough, there are some atoms that are actually stable in in a single atom state, and they are called noble gases. These are the only kind of atoms (not only argon but all of them), that are happy to not stick to other atoms, neither of the same kind, nor different.
Also it’s a weird terminology but noble gas atoms are often referred to as single atomic (or monoatomic) molecules which stretches the molecule definition a bit, but it gives you the general idea that the unit of real world material is not the atom but the molecule. If we look at argon atom as it’s also an argon molecule, then all of a sudden it’s clear that the base unit of the gas is a single molecule, not a single atom. Just the composition of the molecule is different.
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