Element 45 · Solid at room temperature
Rhodium
Looks like: silvery white metallic.
Rhodium is atom number 45 — every Rhodium atom has exactly 45 protons in its center, and that number is what makes it Rhodium and nothing else. Its symbol is Rh. At room temperature it is a solid.
Rhodium is a chemical element with symbol Rh and atomic number 45. It is a rare, silvery-white, hard, and chemically inert transition metal. It is a member of the platinum group.
Summary from the source dataset, derived from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) · original article
Rhodium sits in period 5, group 9 of the d-block. Its 45 electrons fill shells of 2, 8, 18, 16, 1 — written as [Kr] 4d8 5s1. Its electronegativity is 2.28 on the Pauling scale, and pulling the first electron off takes 719.7 kJ/mol. The outermost shell holds 1 electron — the ones that do all the chemistry.
Full configuration: 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d10 4p6 5s1 4d8
Ionization energies (kJ/mol): 719.7, 1740, 2997
Electron affinity: 110.27 kJ/mol · Electronegativity (Pauling):
2.28
Density: 12.41
g/cm³ · melts 2237 K · boils 3968 K
Values exactly as published — see where the data comes from.
Atomic mass
102.905502u
Density
12.41g/cm³
Melts
2237 K
Boils
3968 K
The units on this page — explained by Unitii
Rhodium's family
Elements in the same column share their outer-electron count, so they behave alike.
Source
Discovered by William Hyde Wollaston.
Periodic-Table-JSON (Bowserinator and contributors); element summaries derived from Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · snapshot retrieved 2026-08-21