Basic Atomic Structure: A Look Inside the Atom

Let's take a closer

look

at

atom

s. Atoms are the building blocks that make up everything. All things everywhere. Here I have some drawings. This is table salt, a solid, here is water, a liquid, and finally gaseous oxygen. And what we're seeing here is what we would see if we could take these three things and magnify them millions and millions and millions of times and if we could

look

at them close enough we could see the

atom

s, these little building blocks that make up everything that you are now. the atoms. They're not really little colored circles, but it's a good way to think about them and it's the way we normally draw them when we learn about these things.

Atoms are super small. They are so small that it can be very difficult to understand. about how small they are here is something that might help you think about this take a piece of paper look how wide it is here okay this is so incredibly thin now the atoms are so small it would take 1 million atoms lined up next to one to the other in a row so that they are as thick as this small width of paper, that's how small the atoms are now. What I want to do now is look even closer. Now let's take one of these atoms here and zoom in even closer so we can see what's there.

Inside it here is a magnified view of an atom. It's not a perfect representation of exactly what an atom would look like, but it's close enough for now and check this out. The atom itself is made up of even smaller things, so we said abs. They are like the building blocks of all things, but then if you look at an atom, it has even smaller building blocks that make it up, so in the center of the atom there is something called the nucleus and the nucleus is made up of two small particles there. . They are protons that I have drawn as red circles here and then they are neutrons that I have drawn as blue circles.

The nucleus is here in the middle of the atom and then on the outside of the atom there are these little black circles that I'm using to represent electrons, the electrons that you'll see are connected to these kind of oval paths and I've drawn them to show that the electrons are They move constantly, flying around the outside of the atom at incredibly high speed. speed while the nucleus remains solid here right in the middle of the atom now the electrical charge is very important when we talk about atoms for several reasons protons have a positive charge a proton has a charge of 1 plus electrons on the other hand have a charge negative an electron has a charge of 1 minus now neutrons have no electrical charge at all charge of 0 and neutral is a word we use to refer to something that has no charge, so neutrons sound very similar to neutral, now the positive and negative charges attract, remember that opposite charges attract and that has important consequences on how this atom works.

We said that these electrons fly around the outside of the atom and move very fast, so why don't they? it just flies into space, the reason is that the negatively charged electrons are attracted to the positively charged protons, so the protons attract the electrons and prevent them from flying away, but the electrons move so fast that I can't get in here and touch the protons, that's why they stay outside and don't crash here and touch the protons now, sometimes people ask: well, neutrons don't have a charge, why? important at all well, it seems that neutrons help keep all the particles in the nucleus strongly connected to each other now the electric charge is important something else that is important with atoms is what their masses are, how much they weigh, in order to find out we have to look at the mass of the various things that make up the atom, now a proton and a neutron are very similar in size and mass and they both weigh approximately this many grams, look how small a number this is, right, there is a decimal place.

So far, this is a number that's best represented in scientific notation, but however you write it, it's a really small and unwieldy number, so scientists came up with another way to measure the mass of a proton or neutron and that's using a unit called AMU, the

atomic

mass unit and they said okay, a proton or a neutron weighs about 1 amu, that's a lot easier to use than this measurement here, so the proton or the neutron It weighs about 1 amu, on the other hand an electron is much, much, much smaller. that a proton or a neutron, weighs only 0.0005 times zero amu, so it is a small fraction of how much our proton or a neutron weighs, for this reason, when we talk about the mass of atoms, which we will talk more about go ahead, we usually add up the protons and neutrons to find out how many use, um the atom weighs and then we usually don't even worry about the electrons at all because they are so small that they don't really have much influence on how much an atom weighs is like when you get on a scale to weigh yourself you don't worry about what ring you're wearing or if you're wearing a necklace or something because those things are so small that they weigh so little compared to how much you weigh that it doesn't really influence your weight, so that the protons and neutrons 1 amu and the electrons a small fraction of that now I send to the atom the way it's drawn here is not a perfect representation of what atoms would actually look like We'll talk more about that later, but there are two things for the ones I want to congratulate you right now: the first is the electrons and how they move.

This drawing might make you think that the electrons are spinning in pretty circles on the outside of the atom, that's not actually what's happening, they're buzzing around much more randomly, like hyperactive flies all over the place, more on that later. , the second thing has to do with the size of the nucleus and how far away the electrons are. If this were a real atom blown up many times and the nucleus was the size of a grape, the electrons out here would be almost a mile away, so have this nucleus the size of a grape and a mile away there would be the electron spinning abroad. so that means that most of an atom is actually empty space anyway.

Now that we've talked about what an atom looks like and the particles that make it up, we can go and discuss some of the characteristics we can use to describe atoms. things like

atomic

number, mass number and net charge