Chemical Bonding Basics: Simple Animations to Understand Atoms

Welcome to our exploration of atomic structure and valence electrons with Spark.E!At the center of every atom is a nucleus, containing protons and neutrons.Electrons orbit the nucleus in shells, also called energy levels.Let's look at two different elements. Hydrogen has just one electron, while oxygen has eight electrons in two shells.According to the octet rule, atoms are most stable when their outer shell has eight electrons.The electrons in the outermost shell are called valence electrons. These determine how atoms bond with each other.Carbon has four valence electrons, making it capable of forming up to four bonds with other atoms.These valence electrons determine the chemical properties of the element and how it will interact with other atoms.In ionic bonding, a metal atom gives up its valence electrons to a non-metal atom.Here we have sodium, with one valence electron, and chlorine, with seven valence electrons.Sodium gives up its single valence electron to chlorine.After losing its electron, sodium becomes a positively charged ion, while chlorine gains a negative charge.These oppositely charged ions are strongly attracted to each other.In solid sodium chloride, these ions arrange themselves in a repeating crystal structure.In this crystal structure, each sodium ion is surrounded by chloride ions, and each chloride ion is surrounded by sodium ions.In covalent bonding, atoms share electrons rather than transferring them.Let's look at the simplest example: two hydrogen atoms forming molecular hydrogen, H2.As the atoms come together, they share their electrons, forming a single covalent bond.We can represent this using a Lewis structure, where a line shows the shared electron pair.Oxygen atoms form a double bond, sharing two pairs of electrons.Each oxygen atom contributes two electrons, forming two covalent bonds.Nitrogen forms even stronger triple bonds, sharing three pairs of electrons.Each nitrogen atom shares three electrons, creating one of the strongest covalent bonds in nature.The Lewis structure for nitrogen shows three bonds between the atoms.