Summary: The Importance Of Carbon

Carbon is an extremely important and essential element. It is one of the most abundant in the universe, constituting widely the stars (where the carbon-nitrogen cycles explain its immense amount of energy), the Sun, the comets and also the atmosphere of the vast majority of the planets. On our planet, carbon represents 0.2% of the crust and can be found in all forms of life that inhabit the Earth. If there was no carbon, life would not exist. Considering the wide and varied amount of compounds that can be obtained from carbon, this is a unique chemical element, unlike any other in the periodic table. So far approximately 16,000,000 carbon compounds are known and each year, a new 500,000 are released. This is because, from the combination of

There are compounds of carbon and hydrogen, the aliphatic hydrocarbons, in which the carbon atoms are joined by one, two or three bonds forming chains: for example, the bond is simple in ethane (CH3-CH3), double in ethylene (CH2 = CH2) and triple in acetylene (CHΞCH). These three are gases, but when the number of atoms (and therefore the atomic mass) increases, liquids (such as gasoline) and even solids (such as paraffin) appear. In molecules with double and triple bonds, there are delocalized electrons that give them a special

Also, it is possible to emphasize the family of the natural carbons, also known under the name of fossil carbons. These are the carbons that we find in nature after having been originated by processes of carbonization of vegetables in different strata of the soil or subsoil. We can highlight among these types of carbons, anthracite, coal, lignite or peat. Anthracite is a very hard and compact type of carbon. The purest varieties of anthracite are almost exclusively made of charcoal. The peat is a vegetal matter that has been carbonized of partial form, being in humid zones or