Periodic table explorer

Explore all 118 elements with real photos. Colour the periodic table by family, state, discovery year or trends, then open each element's card. Most elements are shiny grey metals. Some are gases you cannot see unless electricity makes them glow, two are liquids, and a few glow by themselves because they are radioactive.

• Move the temperature. At room temperature only mercury and bromine are liquids. At 6,000 K, hotter than the surface of the Sun, every element with a known boiling point is a gas.
• Only about a dozen elements were known in ancient times. Mendeleev published his table in 1869 and left gaps for elements nobody had found yet. The last gap in row 7 was filled in 2010.
• How strongly an atom pulls on shared electrons. It rises going up and to the right, so fluorine pulls hardest. Most noble gases have no value.
• Each block shows which kind of orbital (s, p, d or f) the outermost electrons fill. That is where the table's shape comes from: 2 columns for s, 6 for p, 10 for d, and the f-block rows below.

1. 1Elements in the same column behave alike, because their outer electrons are arranged the same way. All the alkali metals fizz in water, while the noble gases hardly react at all.
2. 2Atoms get bigger going down a group, because each row adds a new shell of electrons. Going across a row they generally get smaller.

Questions teachers ask