Element 96 · Solid at room temperature
Curium
Looks like: silvery metallic, glows purple in the dark.
Curium is atom number 96 — every Curium atom has exactly 96 protons in its center, and that number is what makes it Curium and nothing else. Its symbol is Cm. At room temperature it is a solid.
Curium is a transuranic radioactive chemical element with symbol Cm and atomic number 96. This element of the actinide series was named after Marie and Pierre Curie – both were known for their research on radioactivity. Curium was first intentionally produced and identified in July 1944 by the group of Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley.
Summary from the source dataset, derived from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) · original article
Curium sits in period 7, group 3 of the f-block. Its 96 electrons fill shells of 2, 8, 18, 32, 25, 9, 2 — written as [Rn] 5f7 6d1 7s2. Its electronegativity is 1.28 on the Pauling scale, and pulling the first electron off takes 581 kJ/mol. The outermost shell holds 2 electrons — the ones that do all the chemistry.
Full configuration: 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d10 4p6 5s2 4d10 5p6 6s2 4f14 5d10 6p6 7s2 5f7 6d1
Ionization energies (kJ/mol): 581
Electron affinity: 27.17 kJ/mol · Electronegativity (Pauling):
1.28
Density: 13.51
g/cm³ · melts 1613 K · boils 3383 K
Values exactly as published — see where the data comes from.
Atomic mass
247u
Density
13.51g/cm³
Melts
1613 K
Boils
3383 K
The units on this page — explained by Unitii
Curium's family
Elements in the same series — near-identical chemistry, which is why they share a row.
Source
Discovered by Glenn T. Seaborg.
Periodic-Table-JSON (Bowserinator and contributors); element summaries derived from Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · snapshot retrieved 2026-08-21