In the sketch below, the red spheres represent protons and the gray spheres represent neutrons. (c) Based on its atomic number and mass number, do you think the product nucleus is stable or radioactive? [Section 21.3]

Video transcript

Hello everyone today. We have the following problem. In the sketch below protons and neutrons are depicted in red and gray spheres respectively, is the products nucleus based on its mass number and atomic number, radioactive or stable. So the reaction depicted by this image is as follows. So we see we have protons meaning that our element in question is going to be nitrogen. If we count the number of yellow or the number of red and gray spheres, protons and neutrons, that's gonna give us our mass number, which is going to be 14. The great spheres represent neutrons. And so we're going to add one neutron as depicted in doing so we look at our product side and we see that we have two red spheres or two protons according to the periodic table. This is going to correlate with helium and if we add the protons and neutrons, once again we have a mass number of four. And so we essentially just have to add what our product nucleus would be to balance this out. So our atomic number is going to be five, which correlates to boron on the periodic table. And then We're going to have as the mass number. And so this is going to be our product nucleus. So this will be our product nucleus. Let's examine the number of protons. Next. The number of protons we see is five and this is odd And we look at the number of neutrons which is six and this is even so, the product nucleus appears to be in the belt of stability, meaning we have an odd number of protons and an even number of neutrons. So essentially odd, even nuclei are stable. And so the product nucleus is therefore going to be stable. And with that we've answered the question overall, I hope this helped, and until next time.