Meet the Chemiballs: Halogen Shenanigans
“Halogen” is a collective name for the elements that fall under fluorine in the periodic table. They all have the naming convention of ending in “-ine”, so you always know when something is a halogen. Though the same naming convention is used for a lot of random chemicals, like cadaverine or quinine, so it’s not a perfect system.
Not only do they have similar properties to each other, being electronegative and good leaving groups, but they’re also uniquely useful to us.
The word “halogen” means “salt-forming” because they like to dissociate from molecules as free ions in solution. That’s what a salt is. Much like your girlfriend, all halogens want from a bond relationship is electrons. Once they have them they’ll spend most of their time away sleeping with other men.
Electronegativity comes from how many electrons an atom has in its outermost “valence” shell. Elementballs want to have a full valence shell like how the noble gasses do. But they have to pretend by sharing electrons, like a family of peasants with a single slice of bread while the nobility eats cake. The closer an atom is to complete its valence shell the more it wants to do it. The halogens need just one more electron, so are very strong.
They’re good for making acids. An acid is any good leaving group attached to a Protonball (a Hydrogenball without its electron). The leaving group will dump that proton brat faster than your dad after he left to buy milk. Foster molecules get broken apart to find space for all the abandoned protons. This can be bad for your health.
Table of contents:
Fluorineball, the Most Electronegative Halogen
Fluorine isn’t just the most electronegative halogen, it’s the most electronegative. Period. Fluorineball will stab you in an alleyway or sell its own grandma just for a taste of sweet sweet electrons.
A good rule of thumb is that any period 2 element (the second row of the periodic table) will be an outlier from the rest of its group (column on the table). Remember how I said that most halogens are good leaving groups? Yeah, fluorine doesn’t do that.
Fluorine forms extremely strong bonds. They’re so strong that, unlike all the other halogenic acids which are very strong, Hydrofluoric acid is actually a weak acid. Its ability to dissolve flesh and glass comes entirely from how reactive the fluorine is. Fluorineball really likes to form bonds with Carbonball and Siliconball and will break almost any other bond to do so.
Chlorineball, the Saltiest Halogen
Chlorine is probably the halogen you’re most familiar with. It’s extremely common in the universe. It’s become the favored halogen of life. Your stomach uses hydrochloric acid to digest food. Your blood pressure is regulated largely by sodium chloride. We need so much chlorine that we’ve evolved to love the taste of sodium chloride, also known as table salt.
Though just because chlorine is so useful in its ionic form doesn’t mean it isn’t still a scary element. Chlorine gas has been used as a chemical weapon after all. elemental chlorine is still pretty reactive. It has the highest electron affinity and the third highest electronegativity.
Why chlorine is the most abundant is more a question of why isn’t Fluorine the most common? Like most period 2 elements, Fluorine has a tragically low abundance in the universe. This is because stars love to eat light elements. The only reason why carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are so abundant is that main sequence stars replace them as quickly as they’re fused. Fluorine has no such luck.
Bromineblob, the Quintessential Halogen
Bromine is a pretty intimidating element. All halogens command respect. But elemental Bromine is one of the nastier ones. It’s one of the few elements that are liquid at room temperature. This makes it pretty annoying to work with because it also sticks to glass. It also fumes a lot. Don’t breathe that.
One could call bromine the most quintessential halogen. It’s still decently electronegative but is also a pretty good leaving group. It best embodies the properties of every other halogen without specializing too much in any of them. You’ll find your chemistry professor using it in equations more than other halogens. But you probably won’t actually use it much for the aforementioned reasons.
Actually true story, I once accidentally spilled bromine on myself and my partner in the lab. Luckily we were wearing coats, gloves, and goggles so it was fine. I managed to rip my gloves off before they turned to goo and my long pants stopped any from touching my skin. Turns out it was only a dilute solution of bromine, though we only found that out after realizing our stoichiometry was messed up. Anyways, the moral of the story is always wear full personal protection equipment for your work environment. You never know when your idiot lab partner is going to douse you with liquid death. There might also be an argument to avoid replacing sleep with gallons of caffeine so you’re not vibrating like a washing machine while working with dangerous chemicals, but I doubt it.
Iodineball, the Most Sublime Halogen
If you’ve heard of iodine, it’s probably from iodized salt. This is because we need a small amount of iodine in our diet to be healthy, but there aren’t a lot of foods that have enough of it. So the government decided to just stick it in salt. Depending on where you live, the government also puts fluoride in tap water. This is a safe form of fluorine that has been found to strengthen teeth.
Iodineball is the fattest of the stable halogens. It’s also the best leaving group of them. These two facts are related, but I’m not going to explain that right now. If you can guess why, answer in the comments. The first commenter to get it right gets the prize of bragging rights and admiration of your peers, I guess.
Iodine is also unique for its ability to sublimate. Sublimation is when a solid boils directly into its gas phase. Most things need to melt into a liquid first. There is a common misconception that Iodine doesn’t have a liquid phase. It does. It’s just normally skipped.
Astatineball & Tennessineball, the Most Unstable Halogens
You might not have heard of these two before. Both astatine and tennessine decay so quickly that they’re both extraordinarily expensive and completely useless. Tennessine was also discovered relatively recently. It probably wasn’t even on your high school chemistry class’ periodic table. Even my spellcheck doesn’t think it’s a real word.
Astatine comes from the Greek word “astatos” which means “unstable” because it has a half-life of 8 hours. Tennessine comes from “Tennessee” which is Greek for Tennessee. (Seriously, how did Tennessee get an element named after themselves when their education spending ranks below Alabama and the Vols can’t even win a game? {I’ve been assured this is a very insightful sportsball reference})
In both cases, I think this was a huge missed opportunity. They should have named the radioactive halogen “Radine” so it can join Radium and Radon in completing the rad-suffix holy trinity.
No one knows what the properties of either element are beyond estimates and observations on the atomic scale. Tennessine is only made in particle accelerators and decays in less than a second. It even decayed in the course of drawing the picture of it. No one has ever been able to assemble enough pure astatine to know what its material properties are. Largely because it would vaporize itself if they did. Some think it might be a metal or a metalloid, which would be interesting.
Addendum
I drew all these. As I am a firm believer in freedom of info on the internet, I give anyone permission to do whatever they want with them. Copy, repost, modify, etc, I don’t care.
These are all poor-quality Jpegs because I value the page load speed of mobile users, and also because of a subversive plot to direct people to my social media. For higher quality versions check out this Reddit post. For more Chemiball stuff, check out r/Chemiballs. This is a shockingly obscure community and deserves more attention.
