What are Isotopes?

What are

isotopes

? Isotope is a word that gets thrown around a lot in chemistry, so

what

are they really quickly? Isotopes are different versions of an element or different versions of a certain type of atom. However, this can be a complicated concept for many people. I'm confused by

isotopes

, so I want to describe them, but starting with a car analogy. Well, I want to tell you about the invented car called Lemona, the epitome of luxury and is known for its very distinctive styling, as you will see. the lemon looks like a lemon now the lemon comes in three different models, there is the borrowed G, the GX Lamone and the GX l lemon, they are all different colors as you can see, but each of these models also has unique features, one has a radio. and leather seats the GX here has chrome wheels and a CD player it's blue the red g XL has massage seats platinum swivel wheels and everything, but this is the point they are all limonis they are all moniz because they all have that distinctive style that They look like a lemon and that's

what

makes a car like Moana okay, so no matter what color it is and no matter the various options you get on these models, like the GX or the GXL, what matters is that They all have this particular shape which is what makes Ala Moana alimony, so we have these three different models.

I want to use this analogy now to talk about the same thing, but with ABS I want to present to you three Kart models as they exist. three models at the moment, well here are the drawings of each of them and what particularly concerns us is the core. I'm using these red dots to symbolize protons and I'm using the blue dots to symbolize neutrons spinning in circles. They are supposed to represent electrons buzzing around the nucleus, but we don't really want to work on that too much, anyway, these three models of carbon are carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14, let's look at the options on them as we see. we did with Ala Moana, let's see how each of these different types of carbon are different.

Well, if we count the number of protons on carbon 12, we will see that it has six protons and if I count all the blue dots here I have. six neutrons okay carbon 13 one two three four five six red dots six protons in this one I have seven neutrons and carbon-14 down here I have six protons and I have eight neutrons so what do we have in common here all the different models of the lemon, although There are things where they differ, they all have the same distinctive lemon shape, so for carbon, what they all have in common is that they have six protons, six protons in the nucleus, and that's what makes a carbon atom is a carbonyl.

It turns out that it doesn't matter how many neutrons it has. It is because carbon is defined by the fact that it has six protons in its nucleus. If you look it up on the periodic table, you'll see something that looks like this and the number up here is the atomic number. six, meaning if an atom has six protons its carbon is fine, that's what they all are, they are all isotopes of carbon, they are different versions of carbon or different models of carbon with the same number of protons in different numbers of neutrons, so look As I wrote this, I have carbon-12 carbon-13 carbon-14 up here.

I want to talk for a minute about numbers, so the number of protons in the nucleus we call the atomic number. You may already have it and then carbon- 12 this 12 that I have written here refers to a different number and we call it mass number, as you will see, it is the number of protons plus the number of neutrons, so this is carbon -12 6 plus 7 protons and 13 neutrons here 6 plus 8 are carbon 14 here this is how we distinguish between these different isotopes different types of carbon there is another way that we sometimes indicate these different isotopes of an atom instead of doing 12 and 13 or 14 and that's using something called isotope notation, let me show you how we do it.

The way we write carbon 12, 13 or 14 isotope notation is that we start with a chemical symbol if you don't already know you can find it on the periodic table so here it is. it's a big capital C so let's start with my C for carbon and then in the bottom corner here I write the atomic number so it's going to be 6 and then up top I'm going to write the mass number which is 12 so this is carbon 12. written in isotopic notation, carbon 13 is going to be 6 again because all carbon has 6 protons from the nucleus, then the 13 up here and finally carbon 14 written in isotopic notation up to c6 14, this is how we can Write all of these carbon isotopes in isotopic notation. then of course you can also just write it as the name of the element with a hyphen and then the number, so that carbon isn't the only type of element that has multiple isotopes;

In fact, like cars, almost all forms of elements come in multiple isotopes. calcium isotopes, for example, if you look in the periodic table you will see that calcium has an atomic number of 20, which means that any atom that has 20 protons in its nucleus is calcium, but as with carbon, you can vary the number of neutrons that is the nucleus, you get all these different isotopes but you still have calcium calcium we have 40 42 43 44 46 48 they all have 20 protons in the nucleus but they have varying numbers of neutrons just like we did with carbon, we can write all these calcium isotopes in isotopic notation where we have the mass number up here and then the atomic number down here, you'll see that they all have the same atomic number of 20 but different mass numbers, the sum of protons. and neutrons, the same goes for iron, just to give you another example, iron has 26 protons in its nucleus, an atomic number of 26 and there are four known isotopes of iron, all of which have 26 protons in the nucleus, but they all have varying numbers of neutrons, you add them up to get the mass number and then you can write it in isotopic notation with a mass number up here and the atomic number down here, so just to review what we've talked about, atoms come in different versions known as isotopes.

They're like different versions of a car or something, the number of neutrons changes, but as long as you have the same number of protons, you'll still have the same type of atom, the same type of element, you can take an atom and write it in isotopic notation. . where you put the atomic number at the bottom and the mass number up here, so that's what isotopes are