science people please?

Question

what is a atom made of?

my husband thinks he is right and he dosent even know what he is talking about

Answer 1

Energy. Believe it or not, all matter is actually made of essentially of compressed energy. Mass and energy are related to each other by the equation E=mc^2, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. At some point in school you were probably told that mass is conserved. That's not actually true when you get down to the atomic level. What's true is that energy is conserved, if you think of mass as a highly ordered form of energy. During nuclear reactions, the total mass of the system changes, and either consumes or releases energy in proportion to that change. If the reaction consumes energy, it also creates mass, and if it releases energy that it loses mass.

The energy is organized into some elements of fairly indeterminate nature, that are currently thought of as being one-dimensional strings. I'm not sure exactly how many levels of organization there are after that (I'm not exactly an expert in this), but eventually it gets to sub-subatomic particles (ex. quarks, if you've ever heard of those). There are six types of quarks (the sub-subatomic particles that ultimately make up atoms), which go together in pairs: left quarks and right quarks, up quarks and down quarks, and charmed quarks and strange quarks. Normal matter is made up of up quarks and down quarks, which are organized into subatomic particles and held together with things called gluons.

The normal subatomic particles are protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons are positively charged, electrons are negatively charged, and neutrons are neutral (hence the name). There are also things called positrons, which are like electrons except they have a positive charge instead of a negative charge, but they're not found in normal atoms.

Protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of the atom. That's where virtually all the mass of the atom is, but it's only a tiny portion of the volume. The electrons are located around the nucleus. However, I'm using the term "located" quite liberally, because electrons aren't exactly "things," so thinking of them having a location is not entirely sensible. Electrons have some properties that indicate their a particle (i.e. an object), and others that indicate they are waves (like light or sound). The weird thing is that they're generally considered to be both a particle and a wave at the same time. Very small fast moving objects actually have noticeable wavelengths and frequencies like a wave, and that's kind of how an electron works (all moving objects have them, but for bigger, slower things they're negligible). So the electrons are kind of chilling out around the atom, and there are regions where they're most likely to "be" at any given time, but they could be anywhere (no, really anywhere, as in there's a tiny probability that an electron for a given atom is actually somewhere on the other side of the galaxy) and they're never really in a single place anyway.

In between those protons, neutrons, and electrons, and making up most of the volume of the is empty space. So basically, an atom is made up of a lot of empty space and some highly ordered energy. Probably not the answer you were expecting, but there you have it.

Answer 2

An atom is made of three basic parcticles:
Neutrons,
Protons,
& Electrons.

Neutrons have no electric charge,
Protons have a positive charge,
Electrons have a negative charge.

Protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, (the nucleus).

A neutral atom has a relationship between the electron and proton because since one parcticle is positive and the other is negative, they are attracted to each other like a magnet. This is how atoms stay together.


P.s. This shouldnt be placed under the "Higher Education (University +) " because this is easy stuff I've learned way back in 6th grade.

Answer 3

In chemistry and physics, an atom (Greek ἄτομος or átomos meaning "indivisible") is the smallest possible particle of a chemical element that retains its chemical properties. The word atom originally meant the smallest possible indivisible particle, but after the term came to have a specific meaning in science, atoms were found to be divisible and composed of smaller subatomic particles.

Most atoms are composed of three types of subatomic particles which govern their external properties:

electrons, which have a negative charge and are the least massive of the three;
protons, which have a positive charge and are about 1836 times more massive than electrons; and
neutrons, which have no charge and are about 1839 times more massive than electrons.

Answer 4

An atom is a collection of matter consisting of a positively charged core (the atomic nucleus) which contains protons and neutrons, and which maintains a number of electrons to balance the positive charge in the nucleus.

Answer 5

the smallest component of an element having the chemical properties of the element, consisting of a nucleus containing combinations of neutrons and protons and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus by electrical attraction; the number of protons determines the identity of the element.

Answer 6

Protons, neutons, electrons & quarks

Answer 7

What the people above me said.

Answer 8

protons neutrons and electrons

Answer 9

protons, electrons and neutrons

Answer 10

protons,neutrons and electrons