How many electrons does oxygen have?

What you need:

• Periodic table

How many electrons? - Here's how to find out

• In chemical Periodic table every element has found its place. The "allocation of space" takes place according to simple physical (and of course also chemical) criteria, namely the number of charges in the atomic nucleus of the corresponding element.
• The number of charges (it is the protons) is actually characteristic of each element. For example, the hydrogen nucleus has only 1 proton in the atomic nucleus, but oxygen already has 8 protons (and also numerous neutrons, the neutral building blocks of the atomic nucleus). And it is precisely this charge number that determines the atomic number of an element in the periodic table, a fact which, incidentally, was not yet known to the early chemists when the periodic table was drawn up.
• With a neutral atom (but not with an ion!) The atomic shell contains exactly the same number of electrons as there are protons in the nucleus. So to find out how many electrons are "floating around" the nucleus of a certain element, all you have to do is look for the relevant element in the periodic table and find its atomic number determine. The atomic number corresponds to the number of electrons in this element.
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The electrons in oxygen

• But how many electrons does oxygen have? Oxygen has the atomic number "8" in the periodic table, accordingly the atomic shell contains 8 electrons. But how are these distributed?
• The atomic shell (in the classic model) is divided into individual shells. The innermost shell (called the K shell) can hold a maximum of 2 electrons. You can fill the following L-shell with a maximum of 8 electrons. If - as with oxygen - a total of 8 electrons are available, 2 electrons go into the K shell and the remaining 6 electrons go into the L shell.


Periodic table of chemistry - simply explained

For many, the periodic table of chemistry is often incomprehensible, even eerie ...

• In the case of oxygen, the L-shell determines its chemical compounds. There - to put it casually - 2 electrons are missing so that the shell is fully occupied. Since chemical elements strive for fully occupied shells in connections, there are still 2 free spaces, for example in connection H₂O (the water molecule), are "donated" by the two hydrogen atoms (1 outer electron each in the K shell).