00:01
In this question we are given a nuclear reaction where a proton is interacting with a mystery element to produce sulfur with the given number of protons and nucleons shown along with a gamma ray, some energy, and then we're asked to find the q value which is the energy either absorbed or released calculated with the difference of the masses between, for lack of a better word, the reactants and the products, the parent particles and the daughter particles.
00:44
All right, so we need to break down our sulfur atom for just a moment.
00:52
So this 16 is called the z value which is the number of protons and then this 32 is the atomic number which is going to be our number of nucleons, in other words protons plus neutrons.
01:27
And our mystery element here will be something where we add one proton to get 16.
01:43
So i'm going to call it zm for mystery element and am for mystery element.
01:51
So zm for our mystery element will be equal to the z for the sulfur minus one because we have a proton that's going to add to both z and a, right? we're adding a proton to the number of protons in the nucleus and that's when we take 16 minus 1 that gives us 15.
02:23
So our mystery element therefore has a z value of 15 and then a for our mystery element is going to be a minus 1 so 32 minus 1 gives me 31 and the element that has a z value of 15 and an atomic mass of 31 is capital p, phosphorus.
02:59
So we could write this reaction as a proton plus our phosphorus atom yields this sulfur atom plus a gamma ray...