Periodic Table of Element is said to be the most significant part of chemistry. It is an arrangement of all the elements in a systematic way. Those familiar with the working of this table can easily extract information about any element by referring to it.
Back in 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist published the first ever Periodic Table of Element. He came up with this table to show the periodic trends of elements. Mendeleev’s periodic table has since been worked upon, refined and expanded.
The elements in the periodic table are arranged from left to right and top to bottom in the increasing atomic number order. The arrangement is also done taking into consideration the recurring chemical properties and electron configurations. This arrangement depicts periodic trends. For example, elements depicting similar behaviour are set in the same column. In the table, within one row, the elements on the left are metals and on the right are non-metals.
Periodic Table of Element:
The rows of the elements are known as the periods and columns are known as groups. An element’s period number shows the highest energy level an electron has in that element. By monitoring an element’s position on this table one can also deduce the electron configuration. The number of electrons goes up in a period as one navigates down the periodic table. Thus, as the atom’s energy level goes up the number of energy sub levels per energy level also goes up. The elements that appear in the same column on the table have similar valance electron configurations and thus portray identical behaviour. For example, all the elements in group 18 are noble gases while all the elements in group 17 are halogens.
The elements from atomic numbers 1 (hydrogen) to 118 (oganessian) have been synthesized with the fresh additions and confirmed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 2015 and officially named in the year 2016. The elements with atomic numbers 1-94 are present naturally though for some only traces are found and interestingly these were first synthesized in the laboratories and then found in nature. On the other hand, those with atomic number 95-118 have only been synthesized in the laboratories.
This Periodic Table of Element is mainly used to determine the relationship between the elements’ properties and foresee the properties of new elements for examining their chemical behaviour. By making use of the periodic table, the scientists can get detailed information about individual elements to come up with more discoveries and inventions. For example, the scientists make use of the atomic mass of carbon in order to find out the number of carbon atoms in a 1 kilogram block of carbon.