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Nature comprises enormous orders of magnitude. They are nonetheless far beyond our imagination and it definitely requires some completely different approach for their accurate measurement: mass spectrometry!Ī note concerning gigantic and minuscule numbers in science. Clearly, using atomic mass units comes in more handy than using kilograms. So one carbon atom 12C possesses a mass of 12 u or 1.99 ´ 10 –26 kg, one molecule of insulin has 5734 u or 9.53 ´ 10 –24 kg. It may appear disappointing to some degree that this simple calculation does not yield the exact mass, but this may even be exploited to our advantage for formula determination based on measuring accurate mass. Provided we know the mass number of an atom, its mass can be calculated quite accurately by multiplying this mass number by 1 u. In analogy to our above calculation we obtain (The nuclide 12C represents the most abundant type of carbon atoms, about 99%, the others are 13C, and in traces the radioactive 14C). The unified atomic mass is defined as 1/ 12 of the mass of one atom of the nuclide 12C. The so-called unified atomic mass (unit symbol u) serves to quantify atomic and molecular mass. Clearly, weighing isn’t anymore an option. And even the attogram is roughly by a factor of 1000 larger than the mass of a single molecule of insulin. So let us go down by several orders of magnitude: 1 ng (nanogram, one billionth of a g or 10 –9 g), 1 pg (10 –12 g), 1 fg (femtogram, 10 –15 g), 1 ag (attogram, 10 –18 g). Even the most sensitive laboratory scales, capable of weighing down to about 1 µg (microgram, one millionth of a g or 10 –6 g) are far away from measuring the mass of a molecule. Now, the proportion of this grapefruit to Earth is also about 1:100.000.000. To illustrate the tiny size of a molecule, one may compare the proportions of a molecule of ascorbinic acid (vitamin C, ca. Large molecules, in particular macromolecules are composed of many atoms. Doing so yields 1.99 ´ 10 –26 kg as the mass of a carbon atom.
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To calculate the mass of a single atom of carbon, we just need to divide the molar mass of 12.0 g (0,012 kg) by the number of particles per mole (Avogadro’s number). The mole is defined as a number of particles, 6.022 ´ 10 23 particles to be accurate. The amount of 12.0 g of carbon corresponds to the amount of substance we define as one mole (1 mol). The masses of atoms and molecules are extremely small, by far beyond our imagination. However, their mass is still the same independent of where they are. We all know the examples of astronauts on Moon where they experience just 1/6 of their weight on Earth. Mass is a physical quantity that is independent of local gravitation. Strictly speaking, a pair of scales measures the weight of an object as the result of being subjected to the Earth’s gravitation. Commonly, we use scales for this type of measurement. We are perfectly used to the determination of the mass of a macroscopic object.