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Let's start by looking up iron's atomic number on a periodic table. We see that this value is 26, thus iron has 26 protons and 26 electrons. It's complete electron configuration must therefore be 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d6. Figuring out the number of valence electrons from this can be tricky, so the next step is to put this into a shorter electron configuration notation; [Ar] 3d6 4s2. This works since argon's electron configuration is 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6. Now we can clearly see that iron has 8 valence electrons, two in the 4s orbital and 6 in the 3d orbital.

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14y ago

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