Daniel -
You can start by looking at the answer to the question
Picture of an Atom for a good description of how protons, neutrons, and electrons come together to make an atom.
Nitrogen
is an atom that has 7 protons, 7 neutrons, and 7 electrons. The
neutrons and protons are all stuck together in the middle of the atom
and are called the nucleus. The 7 electrons are much much smaller than
the nucleus and spin around it in things called orbits. The inner orbit
contains two electrons, and the other 5 electrons are in the second
orbit. This is a picture that I found of a Nitrogen atom. (It's not the
best picture, though, because it makes it look like the electrons are a
lot bigger than the nucleus, and they're actually a lot smaller.)
The
nitrogen atom can stick to other atoms because that second orbit (the
one with 5 electrons in it) would actually prefer to have 8 electrons
in it. So it will stick to other atoms in order to share some of their
electrons in between. This is why if all you have is nitrogen atoms,
they will usually stick together to make N2 (a gas), where each
molecule has two nitrogen atoms that are stuck together. (3 electrons
get shared between them, so it's like they each has 8.)
For everything else you could ever have wanted to know about nitrogen, you can check out
WebElements.Com.
They have information about how nitrogen reacts, the history of
scientists studying nitrogen, and lots of cool pictures (like the one
above) of things that have to do with nitrogen. They even have a really
cool movie of what happens when you touch a chemical called 'nitrogen
triiodide (NI3).'
-Tamara
(published on 10/22/2007)
