What Are Atoms? - A Beginner's Guide

 

Atoms are the Building blocks of matter for everything in this universe! Your mobile phone or computer from which you are reading this article now is made from Atoms. Your body is made of atoms, the Air is made of atoms, and the whole universe is made from atoms! 

You must know what are molecules before getting to know atoms more. Molecules are the smallest unit of a substance, but not the smallest unit of matter. The atoms are the smallest unit of Matter. And here comes the interesting part, that molecules are made of atoms! This is because Atoms are the smallest unit of matter, and when they combine, they form Molecules. So, many atoms join together to form a molecule. For example: a Water Molecule has 1 atom of Oxygen and 2 atoms of Hydrogen, which both are gases.

As you can see in the picture above, a Molecule of Water is made of a total of 3 atoms, 2 of which are of Hydrogen, and 1 is of Oxygen. The fun fact is that though the atoms of this molecule are atoms of a gas, when they combine, they form water! This means when this chemical change occurs, the properties of the elements might change. Now what are elements? Let's talk about it. 

An Element in chemistry is a pure substance, made only from one type of atom. They are the building blocks of matter for rest of the world or even Universe! In every Element's molecule, there are only one kind of atoms. For Example, in one Oxygen's Molecule, there are only the atoms of Oxygen, and no other element. Some Examples of Elements are: Hydrogen (H), Oxygen (O), Carbon (C), Copper (Cu), Iron (Fe), Gold (Au), and Silver (Ag). These alphabetical symbols in brackets you see after an Element's name, that is a symbol of an Element. There is a symbol for every element. And guess what, there are a total of 118 elements in Chemistry!

Now that we have talked about Elements, let's talk about Compounds too!

A Compound is a substance which is formed by two or more Elements, joined together, chemically. These substances are not pure substances. In every compound's molecule, there are different kinds of atoms, of different element. For Example, in one Water's Molecule, there are 2 atoms of Hydrogen, and 1 atom of Oxygen, which are chemically combined together to form water. A few examples of Compound substances are: Sugar, Carbon Dioxide, Different Acids, Oil, and Glucose. Because of variety of ways in which elements chemically combine together to form Compounds, there are Millions of Compounds in Chemistry!

You see? While talking just about Atoms, we learnt about Molecules, Elements and Compounds! This is the advantage of learning Science. If you search for one thing, you'll get so much knowledge! So Remember the following points:

• An Atom is the smallest unit of matter.
• A Molecule is the smallest unit of a Substance.
• Atoms join together to form one Molecule. 
• Substance which's molecule is made from only one kind of Atoms are called Elements.
• Substance which's molecule is made from different kinds of Atoms are called Compounds.