What are the Diatomic Elements?

Well, this video is going to focus on

diatomic

gases, we're going to talk about

what

they are and then we're going to talk about

what

they would look like if we could zoom in and see the atoms and molecules that make things up. Okay, so there are about a hundred

elements

in the periodic table and of those hundred

elements

, seven of them are the

diatomic

elements. These are the diatomic elements here and at the end of the video I'll teach you some memory tricks so that Can you remember which of the elements are diatomic? But anyway, what makes diatomic elements special is that we never find a single atom, just one atom of any of these types on its own, so we never find just a single atom of hanging oxygen or nitrogen. atom or an iodine atom instead, these atoms always pair up, you always find two of them connected together forming a molecule, let me show you what I mean.

I'm going to draw some diagrams and I'm going to put this here, abbreviations. of all the different diatomic elements just so you can remember which elements are diatomic and which ones are okay, so let's take two things that contain gas. There is an oxygen tank here. I stole this from my grandmother's nursing home. I thought, "Hey, Grandma could." I borrowed your oxygen tank for a minute and then went to a kid's birthday party and stole a helium balloon from the clown. Well, this is what I want to do. I want to put on my superhero glasses that allow me to not just look through. the shell of this tank, but let me zoom in billions and billions of times to see the atoms that make up this oxygen gas.

Here's what I'm going to see. Here is my expanded view. Now remember that auction gas is one of their operations. Here this is one of the diatomic elements, so this is what I'm going to look at. I am going to see that oxygen gas is made up of oxygen atoms. You know, that's not a big deal, but I'm going to see everything. of the oxygen atoms in the gas are connected to each other in pairs, well, they are connected in pairs forming molecules, on the other hand, let's look at helium, helium is not one of the diatomic elements, so if I put on my magnifying glass of superhero glasses and look at the helium balloon.

I will also look at the atoms that make up helium, but here h ii ii ii ii is not a diatomic gas. I should also point out that I am talking about gases here, all diatomic elements are gases. at room temperature, which is why we always talk about gases when we talk about diatomic elements. Okay, the diatomic elements pair up. Non-diatomic elements do not. Here's the important thing about this too, although the fact that these guys are paired influences how we write the name of. oxygen gas, so if someone asks you to write the name of the chemical formula of oxygen gas, it is o2 because each piece of oxygen gas is two oxygen atoms connected together forming a molecule, so or two for oxygen gas, but On the other hand, someone says, write down the chemical formula for the gas, for the helium gases in the balloon, it's just a chi, it's not a chi, or anything, it's just a chi, and that's because the helium atoms are there by themselves. alone, one at a time, in the helium just to give you two examples more particularly of the writing of the chemical formulas here I have a hydrogen balloon you can also put hydrogen in a balloon and then I have a light bulb that has argon argon is a gas and light bulbs and here is what hydrogen would look like if you could zoom it in, look here that hydrogen is one of the diatomic elements, while argon, which is not a diatomic element, the atoms would be alone, going back to that idea of ​​how We write the chemical formulas. of things that are made up of diatomic elements hydrogen, someone says write down the chemical equation or chemical symbol for hydrogen gas, it is h2, while argon is just AR, so whether something is diatomic or not influences how we write the name of the chemical, so it is important to remember it. which of the elements are diatomic and which are not, so how can you do that?

There are a couple of waves. This is what I like to do. I like to take the symbol of each of the elements and write it as if it were a letter or a group. of letters in a word and you could do it in this order. I can think of a word that sounds like wrinkled hoff. It's a good way as I remember it, but there are many other ways you can organize the letters that make up the word. symbols for these gases so you know you can probably create many variations on your own, maybe it's best to have a word stuck in your head so you can use Brinkerhoff or you can create one on your own.

Here's another way to do it. remember them some people instead of using chemical symbols as letters they like to remember a phrase and this is used a lot people say don't be afraid of ice cold beer we want to talk about the letters that are in each other in each word, so we have h 4 hydrogen n 4 nitrogen f 4 fluorine o for oxygen I for iodine it gets a little complicated with these last two, which is why I prefer wrinkled but cold anyway don't get confused in timing, the C means carbon, it's C L chlorine and then B and they're at the end of the beer, they're at the end of the beer is bromine, so you can think of Brinkerhoff or another way to organize these guys to come up with a word or not be afraid of ice cold beer.

Hey, you can probably also think of another phrase that you like even more than this one. Okay, that's how to remember them now. If you're interested, I'll take just a minute and talk about why these diatomics. the elements actually pair well, here is a reason the reason is that on their own the diatomic elements are sad atoms, they are unhappy atoms because none of them have a complete valence shell of electrons here I have drawn electron dot diagrams of each of the atoms remember that most atoms want to have eight electrons in their outer and valence shell.

None of these types have eight hydrogens. He would be happy if he had two, but he only has one, so he is unhappy; everyone wants to increase the number of electrons they have in their outer shell so they can make a run on hydrogen, okay so they can have two, this is how they do it, let's look at chlorine here as an example. Chlorine alone is not happy with what we have. two of them next to each other and they say to each other they say hey, we each have seven, we each want one more, we each want to have eight, what would happen if we took these two electrons that we have and decided to share them then?

We would each share two and we would have eight in total, that's exactly what happens, so now we have these two chlorines. I'm going to draw in black here most of the electrons and then they take these two electrons here and share them. I'm going to put the shared electrons in red so that the love electrons that are in red these two now belong equally to both atoms, so now this atom has a and this haddem, since they are sharing, they are both happy and both sharing electrons, the pair of electrons connects them to each other, it is like they are holding hands and we can symbolize this pair of shared electrons with a line that indicates that the two atoms are connected to each other, you just know it like I said like if they were holding hands or like there was a stick connecting the two of them, so we put this line here and that shows that they are sharing a pair of electrons and they are connected to each other individually on their own.

We're not happy, so we never find one of them, but if they connect and make pairs of two, then they both have eight valence electrons, so they're happy. This is not just chlorine, but the same thing happens, let's say with oxygen they are each. The oxygen atom needs two extra electrons, it only has six, so what these two like, what these two oxygens can do is they can share four electrons between them, then they both have eight and each of these pairs of shared electrons we can draw as a line that connects the two or Nitrogen Knight each nitrogen atom wants three electrons so it can share one, two, three pairs of electrons between the two and then each of them has eight and each of these shared electron pairs we draw with a line connecting them, that's why they connect because they're not happy with the valence shells unfolded on their own, they pair up and then they have eight, okay, so they were diatomic gases.