Element 52 · Solid at room temperature
Tellurium
Tellurium is atom number 52 — every Tellurium atom has exactly 52 protons in its center, and that number is what makes it Tellurium and nothing else. Its symbol is Te. At room temperature it is a solid.
Tellurium is a chemical element with symbol Te and atomic number 52. It is a brittle, mildly toxic, rare, silver-white metalloid. Tellurium is chemically related to selenium and sulfur.
Summary from the source dataset, derived from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) · original article
Tellurium sits in period 5, group 16 of the p-block. Its 52 electrons fill shells of 2, 8, 18, 18, 6 — written as [Kr] 4d10 5s2 5p4. Its electronegativity is 2.1 on the Pauling scale, and pulling the first electron off takes 869.3 kJ/mol. The outermost shell holds 6 electrons — the ones that do all the chemistry.
Full configuration: 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d10 4p6 5s2 4d10 5p4
Ionization energies (kJ/mol): 869.3, 1790, 2698, 3610, 5668, 6820, 13200
Electron affinity: 190.161 kJ/mol · Electronegativity (Pauling):
2.1
Density: 6.24
g/cm³ · melts 722.66 K · boils 1261 K
Values exactly as published — see where the data comes from.
Atomic mass
127.603u
Density
6.24g/cm³
Melts
722.66 K
Boils
1261 K
The units on this page — explained by Unitii
Tellurium's family
Elements in the same column share their outer-electron count, so they behave alike.
Source
Discovered by Franz-Joseph Müller von Reichenstein.
Periodic-Table-JSON (Bowserinator and contributors); element summaries derived from Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · snapshot retrieved 2026-08-21