How could a noble gas form stable oxides?

Question

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununoctium

Answer 1

The oxidising non-metals (Groups VI and VII, as we used to call them) always try to "take" electrons from other chemicals. That's why they react really well with metals that have one or two spare electrons to give away.

The noble gases have complete outer shells of electrons, so they're not keen on any reaction which changes that. However, as the number of electrons goes up, the hold the nucleus has on them gets weaker. So if you put Xenon or Radon (heavy noble gases) with Fluorine (king of the electron-grabbers) under the right conditions, the Fluorine will pull an electron out of them.

Oxygen is a weaker electron-grabber but still pretty good, and Uuo is an even heavier noble gas with an even weaker hold on its electrons, so it is entirely plausible that the two could react and form a compound which is stable. For the few microseconds before the Uuo decays, that is!

Answer 2

A noble gas cannot form stable oxides because the outer shell of the atom is completely filled with valence electrons. Therefore it is unreactive.

However in the case of Ununoctium, it has a filled shell also. And by the way, the fact that it can form compounds such as oxides is just a hypothesis by scientists.

The strange chemical properties of this gas may be due to it being a synthetic superheavy element, and it is also semiconductive and radioactive. To conduct electricity, it may use electrons, and the radiation may also emit electrons. These two facts show that it possibly has delocalised electrons around it which may enable stable chemical bonding. A safer answer would be to say that Ununoctium is just an exception.

Answer 3

if you mix crypton with floride you get crypton floride which will form a diamond molecule.

most It was the discovery of the remarkable oxidizing properties of platinum hexafluoride in making the salt O2+PtF6– that led (via the recognition that O2 and Xe have nearly the same first ionization potentials) to the oxidation of xenon by PtF6. Later in 1962, Howard H. Claasen, Henry Selig, and John G. Malm, at Argonne National Laboratory prepared XeF4. Syntheses of XeF2, XeF6, XeOF4, XeO2F2, XeO3, and perxenates (XeO64– salts) were quickly reported from there and elsewhere. Even the highly unstable tetrahedral tetroxide XeO4 was made (J. L. Houston, 1964). A fluoride of krypton, prepared and correctly identified as KrF2 (George C. Pimentel and J. J. Turner, 1963), was first reported as KrF4 (Aristid V. Grosse and coworkers, 1963), but no compound above Kr(II) has ever been established. Although the easier ionization of radon leads one to expect the most extensive chemistry for that element, the high instability of even the most stable isotope has severely limited studies of it. L. Stein, of Argonne, established (in 1962) the existence of a fluoride--probably RnF2--but he and others were unable to confirm the existence of oxides or relatives of the perxenatesnoble gasses though do not share electrons,

Answer 4

Noble gases are relatively inert because they have filled outer s and p-orbitals.
The noble gases beyond the 3rd period have another subshell that is not utilised: the outermost d-subshells. The forth period has an f-subshell not utilised, and the fifth has yet another... and so forth.
I guess this is the reason why bonds can be formed with other atoms to form relatively stable oxides/fluorides. The electrons can easily occupy these vacant orbitals.

Answer 5

Noble gases are also known as inert gases. By definition this means that they do not form oxides or any other compound because they do not react with any elements.

Answer 6

The web site below gives detailed info (too technical to put on here)

Answer 7

I give in........tell me!