Heeeeeeeeeeeey everybody, its me the one and only, Wes here talking about atomic mass and isotopes. WARNING: you are about to hit a big wall of text. One way scientists measure the size of something is by its mass. Scientists can even measure very, very tiny things like atoms. One measure of the size of an atom is its "atomic mass". Almost all of the mass of an atom (more than 99%) is in its nucles, so "atomic mass" is pretty much a measure of the size of the nucleus of an atom. The nucleus of an atom is made up of protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are almost exactly the same size. If you add up the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom, you get that atom's atomic mass. A simple hydrogen atom has just one proton and zero neutrons. Its atomic mass is 1. The most common kind of carbon atom has 6 neutrons and 6 protons. It has an atomic mass of 12. All atoms of a certain element have the same number of protons. Oxygen atoms always have 8 protons; carbon atoms all have 6 protons. Most atoms come in different types called isotopes. Isotopes have different numbers of neutrons. The most common isotope of carbon has 6 neutrons and 6 protons. Its atomic mass is 12. A rare,radioactive isotope of carbon has 8 neutrons. Its atomic mass is 14 ( = 6 protons + 8 neutrons). In chemistry, the number of protons in an atom is more important than the number of neutrons. Scientists call the number of protons the "atomic number". Normal atoms have the same number of electrons as protons. The number of electrons is the main thing that controls how atoms behave in chemical reactions. Scientists use the letter "Z" to stand for atomic number and the letter "A" to stand for atomic mass.
Atoms of the same element can have different numbers of neutrons; the different possible versions of each element are called isotopes. For example, the most common isotope of hydrogen has no neutrons at all; there's also a hydrogen isotope called deuterium, with one neutron, and another, tritium, with two neutrons. If you want to refer to a certain isotope, you write it like this: AXZ. Here X is the chemical symbol for the element, Z is the atomic number, and A is the number of neutrons and protons combined, called the mass number. For instance, ordinary hydrogen is written 1H1, deuterium is2H1, and tritium is 3H1. Now elements can only have a certain number of isotopes. there are "preferred" combinations of neutrons and protons, at which the forces holding nuclei together seem to balance best. Light elements tend to have about as many neutrons as protons; heavy elements apparently need more neutrons than protons in order to stick together. Atoms with a few too many neutrons, or not quite enough, can sometimes exist for a while, but they're unstable
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