Atoms Explained | How small are atoms? |

what are atoms?what are they made up of?

atoms are the basic building blocks or the tiniest things that make up matter. everything in this universe is made up of matter(except Anti-matter), and every matter is made up of atom.

atom is made up of three major components

• Protons
• Electrons
• Neutrons

Protons are the positively charged particles, Electrons are negatively charged and neutrons are neutrally charged.

what is the size of an atom? 

grape fruit

well actually they are really really really small. they are very tiny. how tiny? well to understand this, lets ask a question. How many atoms are there in a grapefruit?

blue berry

lets assume that the grapefruit is made up of only nitrogen atoms. if all the atoms of the grape fruit are blown up to the size of a blueberry, the grape fruit would be the size of the entire EARTH!!

its the same that if we would fill the entire earth with blueberries, then the number of blueberries would be the number of atoms in a single grape fruit.

Structure of an atom

now lets look at the atom. the center of the atom is something called the nucleus, which consists of protons and neutrons and on the outside are the electrons.

How big is the nucleus?

you might remember the picture of the atom you saw earlier and at the beginning of this blog with a small dot in the center marked as the nucleus. well those pictures are not drawn to scale, so they'r kinda wrong.

take a blueberry as a single atom and search for the nucleus in it, then i'm sorry but its not visible. if you blow the atom the size of an entire football stadium, then the nucleus would be barely visible being just the size of a tiny marble!!

isn't your mind blown by this? if not, I've got more.

the nucleus is in the center of the atom and way on the edge are the electrons. so what actually is between the nucleus and the electrons? surprisingly, its just Empty space. that's right, Empty. between them both there are vast regions of empty spaces.

technically there are some electromagnetic fields, but in terms of matter, its empty.

Another very bizarre thing. Since most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in the nucleus, How dense is the nucleus? 

the density at the tip of the nucleus is 4x10 power 17 Kg per cubic meter. that a bit difficult to understand right, so lets put into simpler words.

make a box of 1x1x1 foot. now grab all the nuclei of a car. an average car weigh's 2 tonnes. so How many cars nuclei would it require to put in the box to make the box till the same density of the nucleus of an atom? is it 1? or may be 2? how about a hundred? sorry but the answer is a lot bigger. 

the box would get the density of a nucleus when 6.2 Billion cars would be compressed into the size of the one cubic foot box.

atoms are really amazing things to be learnt about. you could learn a lot about atoms and get many interesting and amazing facts about them. 

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