section_path: Overview
section_name: Overview
paragraph_text: Overview
  
  Each chemical element has a unique atomic number (Z) representing the number of protons in its nucleus. All elements have multiple isotopes, variants with the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. For example, carbon has three naturally occurring isotopes: all of its atoms have six protons and most have six neutrons as well, but about one per cent have seven neutrons, and a very small fraction have eight neutrons. Isotopes are never separated in the periodic table; they are always grouped together under a single element. When atomic mass is shown, it is usually the weighted average of naturally occurring isotopes; but if no isotopes occur naturally in significant quantities, the mass of the most stable isotope usually appears, often in parentheses.
  
  In the standard periodic table, the elements are listed in order of increasing atomic number Z. A new row (period) is started when a new electron shell has its first electron. Columns (groups) are determined by the electron configuration of the atom; elements with the same number of electrons in a particular subshell fall into the same columns (e.g. oxygen, sulfur, and selenium are in the same column because they all have four electrons in the outermost p-subshell). Elements with similar chemical properties generally fall into the same group in the periodic table, although in the f-block, and to some respect in the d-block, the elements in the same period tend to have similar properties, as well. Thus, it is relatively easy to predict the chemical properties of an element if one knows the properties of the elements around it.
  
  The first 94 elements occur naturally; the remaining 24, americium to oganesson (95–118), occur only when synthesized in laboratories. Of the 94 naturally occurring elements, 83 are primordial and 11 occur only in decay chains of primordial elements. A few of the latter are so rare that they were not discovered in nature, but were synthesized in the laboratory before it was determined that they do exist in nature after all: technetium (element 43), promethium (element 61), astatine (element 85), neptunium (element 93), and plutonium (element 94). No element heavier than einsteinium (element 99) has ever been observed in macroscopic quantities in its pure form, nor has astatine; francium (element 87) has been only photographed in the form of light emitted from microscopic quantities (300,000 atoms).