CHEMISTRY COMMUNITY

What is important/what do we need to know about nodal planes in the atomic orbitals?

Based off of the homework questions in the textbook, believe we need know how many nodal planes there are for the s p d orbitals. (However, if you look at the assigned homework, questions regarding the nodal planes were skipped.)

Nodal planes are planes on which there is no chance that an electron will be found.
The s-orbitals have no nodal planes, but the p- and d- orbitals do.

They are mainly of interest when we are trying to figure out the location of an electron in a given orbital.
The electron will never be at the nucleus or on the nodal plane.

Adding on to the previous point, orbitals are basically probability distributions since we know that it is impossible to find out an electron's exact position at any given time. A nodal plane is simply put, an area in which there aren't any electrons. In other words, it is where the graph of the orbital equals 0.