The Most Massive Molecule - Periodic Table of Videos

from time to time viewers ask us about record-breaking molecules the biggest the heaviest the lightest the smallest i want to tell you about the heaviest possible molecule that you can have with five atoms that molecule is organesson element 118 tetratenocide that is with four atoms of tenocine 117 now this is purely a theoretical exercise because although people have made atoms of organism and tenocine they've never made the atoms at the same time did you make a ganeshan in this reactor yes yes but they're really two quite interesting questions that you can tackle using computation the first question is will organison actually react with tenocine xenon which is next to iodine in the periodic table doesn't react with iodine so you can't get xenon tetra iodide or at least nobody's isolated it as well as i'm aware so one question is if you could make this molecule would it be stable would there be bonds actually between the atoms or would they fall apart the second question which chemists always ask is what shape would the molecule be could it be a tetrahedron that's with four tenocines with the organessan in the middle could it be a square again with the organess on in the middle but with the four tennis scenes around it now a recent paper tackles this problem computationally and their computations have two different versions one is a fairly straightforward computation the other one considers so-called relativistic effects before we think about the calculations few numbers methane ch4 which is the lightest stable five atom molecule weighs 16 units organess on tetratenocide would weigh 1470 units that's about 92 times heavier so it's quite big if you add up all the electrons in this molecule they're 586 electrons which is a lot and this is what makes the computational challenge so big the other point is when electrons travel very rapidly and their speed approaches the speed of light they get much heavier this is a consequence of einstein's relativity theories so in the calculations you can do two types of calculation one type in which you ignore the relativity and ignore the fact that the electrons are traveling so fast around the nuclei of the atoms and the other one in which you include relativistic effects we had a video some time ago explaining how relativistic effects explain why the element mercury is a liquid when most other metals are solids the upshot of these calculations is that without relativistic effects organism tetratenocide appears unstable it wouldn't easily bond together with relativistic effects it is stable not enormously but it could form and the fact that you can get a compound of a organess on and tenocine is really quite interesting what shape is it well if you asked inorganic chemists like me they will say well xenon tetrachloride is a square like this so we'd expect organess on tetratenocide to have the same shape it turns out that these calculations suggest that it would be tetrahedral that's not the shape that we might expect you can ask is this all very important doing a calculation about a molecule which is pretty unlikely ever to be made and i would say yes it is important because it is showing how one can refine the computational techniques to get what we hope are better answers now you might say that's just martin's personal view but in this journal here they have 2021's dramatic digits in chemistry and down here is 586 the number of electrons in organism tetratenocide with a picture of the molecule we've done plenty more videos about super heavy elements including trips to russia the united states and germany there'll be links on the screen at the moment and also down in the video description

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 290,569

Keywords: periodic, videos, chemistry

Id: 5YQwFjJ9GX4

Length: 5min 51sec (351 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022