Compound reference
Methane
CH₄
The chemistry
Four bonds, no lone pairs - the textbook tetrahedron at 109.5°. Carbon does this trick with almost everything; it is why organic chemistry is so big.
Remember it as…
Carbon's four valence electrons each shake hands with one H. Four equivalent bonds → 109.5° tetrahedron.
Common mix-up
Methane is NOT flat. Drawn as H–C–H crosses on paper for shorthand, but in three dimensions the four hydrogens sit at the corners of a tetrahedron, not in a plane.
Where the name comes from
From Greek methy (wine) + hyle (matter) - early chemists isolated wood-spirit (methanol) before they understood that the simplest hydrocarbon was its decomposition product.
Where you meet it
Natural gas; combustion fuel; the simplest member of the alkane series; greenhouse gas ~28× more potent than CO₂ over 100 years.
PubChem facts
- IUPAC name
- methane
- Molecular weight
- 16.043 g/mol
Also known as: marsh gas, fire damp, methyl hydride
Handling note
Highly flammable: it forms explosive mixtures with air, and it displaces oxygen as an asphyxiant.
BondingMolecular geometry
Chemical data from PubChem (NIH/NCBI)