What are elements? What are atoms and sub-atomic particles?

Question

I know elements are part of chemistry, but what is is?

Answer 1

elements are molecules made of the same type of atoms, compounds being those which are made of different atoms. atoms are those tiny particles that make up molecules. a molecule may consist of any number of atoms. sub-atomic particles are the ones that make up atoms, and they are the protons, electrons and neutrons.

Answer 2

An element is the smallest unit of a substance that retains it's characteristics as a single atom. One atom of iron has the same character is one pound.
Molecules are combinations of atoms, like water H2O, and methane CH4.
Sub atomic particles make up atoms.
An atom is a nucleus of protons, neutrons, and other particles, held together by the Strong Force, the most powerful of the four basic forces (Strong,Weak, ElectroMagnetic, and Gravity).
Electrons orbit the atom in shells and orbitals, not in neat spheres, but more complicated shapes of probability graphs.
These are all approximations of quantum equations, such as the Schroedinger Equation, which are very difficult but the only accurate model of these things.
See: atomic chart (the elements).

Answer 3

sub atomic particles are charged and non charged particles that create atoms. the nucleus of an atom is created by the positively and nutraly charged particles called Protons and Neutrons. and the negatively charged particles that surround the nucleus are called electrons. with different numbers of protons you can have different elements. and addint elements togeather can make compound substances. basicly elements are objects that only use one kind of atom to make. for example. in gold there is only one kind of atom. and those atoms are called gold because of their atomic number being the same as gold which makes them gold. but something else like bronze takes multiple elements combined to create its structure.

Answer 4

Elements: substances which are made of atoms, all of which have the same atomic number. Examples of elements include oxygen, silicon, sodium, gold, argon, gadolinium and uranium.

Atoms: Smallest particle of an element that still retains the chemical properties of the element. 1 gram of the element hydrogen contains 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms of hydrogen. That number is called Avogadro's Number, and represents the number of things in a MOLE.

Subatomic Particles: The first subatomic particle discovered was the electron, easiest to find because it is on the outside part of the atom. Through a hundred years of refining experimentation, it has been shown that the electrons orbit the nucleus in wave-like patterns whose individual paths are impossible to calculate. The region of an atom where the electron is most likely to be found at any given time is called an "orbital". Orbitals are clustered into "sublevels", which are clustered to form "Principal energy levels" (which used to be called "shells". The electrons zip around the nucleus, which has virtually all of the mass of the atom, but makes up only a tiny portion of the volume of the atom. The nucleus is made of positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons. The number of protons in an atom is called the "atomic number", and every element has a unique number of protons in its atoms' nuclei. Oxygen atoms have eight protons in their nuclei, carbon atoms all have six. The number of neutrons may vary from atom to atom, giving us what are known as isotopes. Carbon atoms (which all have six protons) with six neutrons gives us the isomer C-12, carbon atoms with eight neutrons give us C-14. When you add the protons and neutrons in the nucleus together, you get the "mass number". Most smaller atoms are happy (stable) with roughly the same number of protons and neutrons. Larger atoms seem to need more neutrons than protons to keep the nucleus stable. Nuclei with too many or too few neutrons are "radioactive", which means they spit out pieces of themselves in an effort to get to a more stable proportion of protons to neutrons.

Protons and neutrons are themselves made up of quarks, but most folks stop at protons, neutrons and electrons.

Compounds are made of atoms of elements chemically bonded together. These chemical bonds can occur when atoms of two elements transfer electrons between them (forming charged atoms, called "ions"), forming an ionic bond. Salt (sodium chloride) is formed when sodium atoms give an electron to chlorine atoms. The sodium atoms become positively charged, the chlorine atoms become negatively charged, and the two oppositely charged ions attract to form an ionic bond.

Atoms of two elements can also share electrons. This forms a "covalent" bond, and creates new particles called "molecules". Water is a molecule formed from two hydrogen atoms sharing electrons with one oxygen atom. Molecules are very tough...it's very hard to break a covalent bond, not so difficult to break an ionic bond.

There you have a basic introduction to chemistry!