WORLD OF THE ELEMENTS
EXPLORE THE PERIODIC TABLE IN A HIGHER RESOLUTION HERE!
This 2023 poster infographic showcases an up-to-date periodic table of the elements, visualizing all 118 currently known chemical elements, from hydrogen to oganesson. Included are many of their characteristics and properties, such as atomic weight, melting and boiling points, density, electron structure, crystal structure, mohs hardness, spectral emission lines, oxidation states and more.
On this periodic table, you will find photographs and illustrations pertaining to each element, if possible showing it in its pure state; in case of many radioactive elements, minerals containing trace quantities of them.
Surrounding it, you will find a lot of useful information, including the origins of various chemical elements, shapes of electron orbitals, as well as the abundance, discovery, naming origins, annual production and monetary value of elements, diagram of the states of matter, how did the different elements making up our planet form, and structures of several hundred important and interesting organic and inorganic molecules.
The periodic table of the elements arranges all known chemical elements into rows (periods), and columns (groups), and is widely used in chemistry, physics and other sciences. Its arrangement of the elements showcases the “periodic law”, that tells of an approximate recurrence of many properties, such as density, melting point, reactivity or electrical conductivity. of elements sharing the same column. This recurrence exists because of their similar outer electron configuration.
Several trends are evident on the periodic table. One of them is electronegativity, the atom’s ability to attract electrons when forming a chemical bond, which also corresponds to the bond energy and the element’s reactivity. It increases from the bottom left to top right, with francium having the lowest electronegativity and fluorine having the highest. On the contrary, atomic radius and density decreases from the bottom left to top right - atoms of the noble gases are over twice as small in radius than those of alkali metals that follow them.
As we go from right to left, elements increasingly gain metallic character, from non-metals to weakly metallic metalloids followed by metals. Melting and boiling points of elements, with some exceptions such as carbon, peak in the center of the periodic table with tungsten, tantalum and rhenium, and decrease in either direction. The first periodic table to become widely accepted was that created in 1869 by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who reportedly envisioned it in a dream, arranging chemical elements by their atomic mass. At the time, dozens of chemical elements were not yet known, so he put gaps in his periodic table, succesfully predicting some of the properties of undiscovered elements such as Scandium, Gallium and Germanium. The periodic table only reached its modern recognizable shape in 1945, when Glenn T. Seaborg put the actinides in their proper position below the lanthanides.
Every period in the periodic table corresponds to a new outer electron shell, with the maximum being 7 distinct shells. Chemical elements with the same number of electrons in their outer electron subshell can be found in the same column (group).
Each chemical element has their unique atomic number, representing the amount of protons found in its nucleus. However, most elements also have several different isotopes, differing in the amount of neutrons. Some elements have only a single stable isotope, many have multiple, but most isotopes are radioactive, cannot be found in nature and decay quickly. Of all the currently known elements, 94 occur naturally, 83 being stable, while the remaning 24, americium to oganesson, can only be synthesized using particle accelerators. No element heavier than einsteinium (99), has ever been amassed in macroscopic quantities, and half lives of all elements beyond copernicium (112) can be only measured on the scale of seconds. Of the 94 naturally occuring elements, 9 are gaseous at room temperature, 2 occur in a liquid state and remaining 82 are solid. Atoms of chemically pure elements can chemically bond to each other in multiple different arrangements, resulting in a number of different “allotropes”. For instance, carbon can bond in a lattice of hexagonal sheets as graphite, in a cubic lattice as diamond, or chaotically to for amorphous carbon in coal. Allotropes can differ wildly in their hardness, density and other properties.
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