A gram of water (about a thimble of water) contains 1023 atoms. (That’s a ‘1’ with 23 zeros after it.) That means there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a thimble of water! That’s more atoms than there are drops of water in all the lakes and rivers in the world.
Nearly all the mass of an atom is in its nucleus which occupies less than a trillionth of the volume of the atom. They are very dense. If you could pack nuclei like marbles, into something the size of a large pea, they would weigh about a billion tons! That’s 2,000,000,000,000 pounds! More than the weight of 20,000 battle ships! That’s a heavy pea!
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The distance from the nucleus to the electron is 100,000 times the diameter of the nucleus itself. So, if you were to somehow blow up a nucleus to be the size of a golf ball, the electron would be 8,300 feet away or more than 1.5 miles from the golf ball. If you put that golf ball on the ground, you would need to climb to the top of five and a half Sears Towers to get to the electron!
Let’s compare this to the Sun and the Earth. We’ll be doing more about distances and sizes when we do our lesson in Astronomy, but for now, we’ll just use this quick example:
If you shrank the Sun down to a golf ball, the Earth would only be 9 inches away. Nine inches vs. 1.5 miles! There is 11,000 times more distance between the nucleus and an electron than there is between the Sun and the Earth! This means that if they were all the same size (to scale), then the Earth-Sun distance is waaaay smaller than the electron-nucleus distance!
Here’s one last example – if you enlarged the hydrogen atom (one proton in the nucleus and one electron in a shell) so that it’s the size of the Earth, the electron would be skimming along on the surface of the Earth while the nucleus (just a proton in this instance) would be only the size of a basketball deep inside the core. The rest, from the core to the surface, is empty space. (Look out your window – can you even see the curvature of the Earth from where you are? Probably not – it’s just too vast a distance!)
Are you mind-boggled? What this is basically saying, is that matter is virtually empty. The nucleus, which is incredibly tiny and quite heavy for it’s size, is outrageously far away from its electrons. An atom has almost nothing in it and yet everything we come in contact with is made of this ‘nothing’! I don’t know about you, but I find that fantastic!
We will talk more about this wacky atom thing and we’ll get into more detail about the even wackier electron. In the meantime, try to think about everything as a bunch of atoms. The next time you drink milk, you’re drinking atoms. The next time you feel wind, you’re feeling atoms. A lot of things become a bit clearer if you think of objects as being nothing more than bunches of small particles stuck together.
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Wow! These are atomic facts that I didn’t know before! I knew that there were electrons, etcetera, but not the distance between the electron and the nucleus!
cool!