Period (periodic table) eighth period. Period (periodic table) A period in the periodic table is a horizontal row. All elements in a row have the same number of electron shells. Each next element in a period has one more proton and is less metallic than its predecessor. Arranged this way, groups of elements in the same column have similar chemical and physical properties, reflecting the periodic law. For example, the alkali metals lie in the first column (group 1) and share similar properties, such as high reactivity and the tendency to lose one electron to arrive at a noble-gas electronic configuration. As of
Extended periodic table than "Z" = 137, on the grounds that the relativistic Dirac equation predicts that the ground-state energy of the innermost electron in such an atom would be an imaginary number. Here, the number 137 arises as the inverse of the fine-structure constant. By this argument, neutral atoms cannot exist beyond untriseptium (alternatively called "feynmanium"), and therefore a periodic table of elements based on electron orbitals breaks down at this point. However, this argument presumes that the atomic nucleus is pointlike. A more accurate calculation must take into account the small, but nonzero, size of the nucleus, which is predicted to