is ethanol chiral?
Why would it be chiral?
It is not chiral.
for a molecule to be chiral it has to have 4 DIFFERENT substituents
ethanol (either carbon)
has one substituent which is a cH3 (methyl) and 3 other hydrogens so there is a repeat of 3 hydrogens and thus it is not chiral.
Yes, ethanol is a chiral molecule. To determine if a molecule is chiral, we need to examine its symmetry. A molecule is considered chiral if it does not possess an internal plane of symmetry or a center of symmetry.
Ethanol (C2H5OH) has a carbon atom, known as the chiral or asymmetrical carbon, bonded to four different groups: an ethyl group (C2H5) and a hydroxyl group (OH). The presence of the chiral carbon, which lacks symmetry, results in mirror image forms called enantiomers.
Therefore, ethanol exists as two enantiomers, (R)-ethanol and (S)-ethanol, which are non-superimposable mirror images of each other. They have identical physical and chemical properties but differ in the way they interact with other chiral molecules.