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Asked by Charlotte to Anna, George, Jodi, Rob, Stefan on 18 Nov 2014.
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Stefan Lines answered on 18 Nov 2014:
Generally speaking Metals are much better conductors of heat and electricity and are solids at room temperature. They can be magnetic and malleable too. There are exceptions though; Graphite for example, in your pencil, conducts electricity and Mercury is a liquid at room temperature.
Sometimes they are difficult to define this way.
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Anna Scaife answered on 18 Nov 2014:
This depends who you ask 🙂
To a physicist generally a metal is a densely packed lattice of atoms each of which loses one (or more) of their outer electrons, so there’s a kind of cloud of electrons floating around the lattice. It’s this cloud of electrons that allows heat and electricity to be conducted so easily by metals. Metals also have a number of other properties such as the fact that you can bend them (they’re malleable) and they expand when you heat them. As Stefan says, graphite has similar properties to metals in terms of its conductivity but it doesn’t expand when you heat it and it doesn’t bend, so it’s not a metal.
To an astronomer a “metal” is any element heavier than helium! This is just laziness on our part really – hydrogen and helium make up so much of the Universe that we just group together everything else as metals…
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