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Carbon The Strangest Element On Earth

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Carbon is a chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent—its atom making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. It belongs to group 14 of the periodic table.Carbon makes up about 0.025 percent of Earth’s crust.

source/image: Thoisoi2 – Chemical Experiments!

Three isotopes occur naturally, 12C and 13C being stable, while 14C is a radionuclide, decaying with a half-life of about 5,730 years.Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity.Now I am going to tell you more about an unusual element as carbon.

The allotropes of carbon include graphite, one of the softest known substances, and diamond, the hardest naturally occurring substance. It bonds readily with other small atoms, including other carbon atoms, and is capable of forming multiple stable covalent bonds with suitable multivalent atoms.

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Carbon is a component element in the large majority of all chemical compounds, with about two hundred million examples having been described in the published chemical literature.Carbon sublimes in a carbon arc, which has a temperature of about 5800 K (5,530 °C or 9,980 °F). Thus, irrespective of its allotropic form, carbon remains solid at higher temperatures than the highest-melting-point metals such as tungsten or rhenium.

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