Question

Magnesium has three naturally occurring isotopes: Mg-24 with mass 24.3050 amu and a natural abundance of 78.99 %, Mg-25 with mass 24.9858 amu and a natural abundance of 10.00 %, and Mg-26 with mass 25.9826 amu and a natural abundance of 11.01 %.

Calculate the atomic mass of magnesium.

Answer 1

What you do here is you multiply the weight of the isotope by its abundance and add up what you get to get the atom's abundance.


`(24.3050*.7899)+(24.9858*.1000)+(25.9826*.1101)= 25.55778`
So the abundance is 25.5578 amu.