Atomic mass in 12 grams of the carbon isotope C-12. The number of atoms in a mole is called Avogadro's number, the value of which is approximately 6.022 × 10. One mole of a substance always contains almost exactly the "standard atomic weight" or "molar mass" of that substance; however, this may or may not be true for the "atomic mass," depending on whether or not the element exists naturally in more than one isotope. For example, the standard atomic weight of iron is 55.847 g/mol, and therefore one mole of iron as commonly found on earth has a mass of 55.847
Atomic mass unit of exactly 16 amu in physics. The divergence of these values could result in errors in computations, and was unwieldy. The chemistry amu, based on the relative atomic mass (atomic weight) of natural oxygen (including the heavy naturally-occurring isotopes O and O), was about as massive as the physics amu, based on pure isotopic O. For these and other reasons, the reference standard for both physics and chemistry was changed to carbon-12 in 1961. The choice of carbon-12 was made to minimise further divergence with prior literature. The new and current unit was referred to as the "unified atomic mass