What is Carbon atom?

     

Carbon is a chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6.  It is nonmetallic and tetravalent making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds.  It belongs to group 14 of the periodic table.  Carbon makes up only about 0.025 percent of Earth's crust.  Three isotopes occur naturally, 12C and 13C being stable while 14C is a radionuclide, decaying with a half-life of about 5,730 years.  Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity. 

     Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's curst, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen.  Carbon's abundance its unique diversity of organic compounds, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth enables this element to serve as a common element of all known life.  It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.

     The most common oxidation state of carbon in inorganic compounds is +4, while +2 is found in carbon monoxide and transition metal carbonyl complexes.  The largest sources of inorganic carbon are limestones, dolomites and carbon dioxide, but significant quantities occur in organic deposits of coal, pear, oil, and methane clathrates.  Carbon forms a vast number of compounds, more than any other element, with almost ten million compounds described to date, and yet that number is but a fraction of the number of theoretically possible compounds under standard conditions.  For this reason, Carbon has often been referred to as the "KING OF THE ELEMENTS".