Question: Dear all, The topic of our aloted zone is Nobilium and its radio active propoties how ever i am interested in the the number of electrons in particels. Say you hade a pottasium molecule which has 19 electrons in it's whole particle which means it has 1 electron on it's outer shell and is extremly unstable, in the second shell it would have 8 electrons (a full shell) that is stable. In that second shell is it possible to remove one of the electrons to create an even more unstable element? If you can manage to remove an electron from the second shell will an electron from the third shell replace it and create a more stable element. When I researched deeper into my question i found that Frankium (FR) is the most reactive element and only suvives in labs for short periods of time, with my theroy of removing elctrons is it possible to create a more reactive element than Frankium? Please answer in full if you can, Yours truley xXMrBeastXx.

Oliver Gordon answered on 11 Mar 2019: last edited 11 Mar 2019 11:25 am

Ok, I’ve gone and asked a few people around the office. Here’s what 5 of us have come up with (but take this with a grain of salt – we don’t really know the answer either!):
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You are right when you talk about “instability”. However, there’s a second thing at play, which is the overall energy of the system. For various reasons, things always want to be in their “lowest energy configuration”. Or in other words, when you walk to school you don’t mind walking across the grass if it gets you to the door faster!
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Atoms are the same – and this means that they have a full outer shell. This is why they are more “reactive” when the shells aren’t full. “unstable” is also true – when this happens the atom will undergo radioactive decay and try and get rid of an electron or two protons+two neutrons or just an excess of energy with a photon. It does this to try and be more stable.

Now, somebody pointed me towards something called the Auger effect – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auger_effect. This is something I hadn’t heard of before, and from what I understand of it it’s what happens when you remove an inner electron! I didn’t think this was even possible, so bang up job here! In its simplest form, it means that when you remove an electron from an inner shell (so it’s definitely possible!) an electron from a higher shell comes down to fill its place. Because of the wanting to go to the lowest energy state, I would have to assume that you are right – removing an electron from the inner shell of Frankium would make something more unstable. But it would be so unstable that the Auger effect would happen, and drop an electron down. Putting you back where you started.
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So I think you’re right, but if you did it in reality an electron on the outer shell would almost immediately come back down and fill the gap.
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As to HOW you remove that electron from the inner shell rather than the outer shell, I think that’s your biggest difficulty. A quick bit of research tells me that it’s doable for silver with X-Rays. I can’t see any scientific papers of scientists doing this for Frankium, though!