Element 15 · Solid at room temperature
Phosphorus
Looks like: colourless, waxy white, yellow, scarlet, red, violet, black.
Phosphorus is atom number 15 — every Phosphorus atom has exactly 15 protons in its center, and that number is what makes it Phosphorus and nothing else. Its symbol is P. At room temperature it is a solid.
Phosphorus is a chemical element with symbol P and atomic number 15. As an element, phosphorus exists in two major forms—white phosphorus and red phosphorus—but due to its high reactivity, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Earth. Instead phosphorus-containing minerals are almost always present in their maximally oxidised state, as inorganic phosphate rocks.
Summary from the source dataset, derived from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) · original article
Phosphorus sits in period 3, group 15 of the p-block. Its 15 electrons fill shells of 2, 8, 5 — written as [Ne] 3s2 3p3. Its electronegativity is 2.19 on the Pauling scale, and pulling the first electron off takes 1011.8 kJ/mol. The outermost shell holds 5 electrons — the ones that do all the chemistry.
Full configuration: 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p3
Ionization energies (kJ/mol): 1011.8, 1907, 2914.1, 4963.6, 6273.9, 21267, 25431, 29872 … (15 published)
Electron affinity: 72.037 kJ/mol · Electronegativity (Pauling):
2.19
Density: 1.823
g/cm³ · melts — · boils —
Values exactly as published — see where the data comes from.
Atomic mass
30.9737619985u
Density
1.823g/cm³
Melts
—
Boils
—
The units on this page — explained by Unitii
Phosphorus's family
Elements in the same column share their outer-electron count, so they behave alike.
What it becomes
Everyday compounds in our curated set that contain Phosphorus — the upward direction of the map: atom → molecule → stuff you know.
Source
Discovered by Hennig Brand.
Periodic-Table-JSON (Bowserinator and contributors); element summaries derived from Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · snapshot retrieved 2026-08-21