in an atom why electrons are being negatively charged?

Answer 1

Like many said before me, electrons are not just there to offset the net positive charge created by the protons and netrons in the centre of the nucleus of an atom, although it may be true.

I've always believed that electrons are transferrable subatomic particles that are there to simply participate in reactions! I mean as we all know that protons and neutrons are fixed in the nucleus and cannot move from their position! However, electrons can and will when chemical reactions take place! Because electrons are negatively charged, they can be attracted by the positive charge of the nucleus (since opposites attract) which cannot be transferred like I mentioned earlier. So, instead, these electrons will transfer themselves from chemical species to species and participate in a variety of reactions. If electrons were not there, there would not be any chemistry! What a sad thought! So, in essence, they are very important subatomic particles. They are there to do a lot of things such as make up most of the atom, get transferred to create ions, participate in redox reactions, offset the positive charge of nucleus to create neural atoms, and so on.

Hope this helps,

Karan Shah

Answer 2

The definitions of negative and positive were arbitrarily decided based on the definition of electrical current. Back when people invented electrical current, they didn't understand electrons, so they decided one direction was positive and that was the way current flowed, which turned out to be the opposite direction of the way electrons moved. Oops. So electrons were later labelled as having a negative charge to explain why what people called the positive current was the opposite of the way electrons were moving, and current actually describes the direction a theoretically positive particle WOULD be moving, if it were there.

Seems silly I know. But the definition stuck, and since it doesn't matter which particle is called negative and which particle is called positive, nobody minds (unless you work with currents).

Actually you can make atoms out of antimatter, which have a negative anti-proton and a positive anti-matter electron called a positron. But that requires a huge amount of energy (given by E = mc^2) and the backwards atom with positive on the outside will have a neutral charge overall. It is impossible to contain antimatter when it has no charge (magnets and electrostatics no longer can repel it), so a whole atom of antimatter won't stay where it is, instead it will immediately collide with nearby regular matter, which causes an explosion that destroys both.

You could also try making an atom with a normal electron in the "middle" and an anti-matter positive electron orbiting it. But they would actually orbit their combined center, and the laws of quantum physics only allow a few specific kinds of orbit to be stable, which wouldn't work for this combination, so they would eventually spiral into each other and explode. Even if they didn't collapse they would still explode when they contacted regular matter.

So making backwards atoms out of anti-matter is out of the question.

But there are other sub-atomic particles you can make atoms out of. There are larger versions of protons, and also larger versions of electrons, which can have different charges. But these particles quickly disintegrate and turn into the regular versions we know and love, or anti-matter versions thereof. Also they suffer from the same quantum physics problems of only certain kinds of orbits being possible and those ones not necessarily being stable.

So you can't build any other kinds of atoms with positive on the outside and negative on the inside, unless you are in the middle of a large vacuum with no matter around, or unless you don't mind it lasting for less than a second.

Edit: Oh I almost forgot. you can't have an atom with electrons in the middle and protons orbitting it for two reasons. One, the protons are big heavy particles that can't move the way electrons do. And two electrons don't stick together. Protons can stick together even though they have the same charge and should theoretically repel, because there is a special law that only applies to things like protons. Electrons are very different, and can't stick together. They always repel each other, so there is no way to glue them together into a nucleus. Protons and electrons have equal charges (in opposite directions) but are VERY different in all other ways. So you can't swap them around.

Answer 3

why questions are not in the realm of science.
Electrons are negative only be convention. They could have been positive. For the positive case your question is not scientific.
A more neutral one would have been, why do electrons have charge. Well, this is not a question for science, but for philosophers.

Answer 4

as we know there are photons in atom centre which are positively charged thus to make a stable the atom there must be something which is in apposite to phon in charge thus elctrons are in negative charge

Answer 5

An atom consists of protons,neutrons and electrons.The neutrons are neutral while electron and proton are oppositely charged so we take one as +ve(proton) and other as -ve(electrons)

Answer 6

Because protons are positively charged. A collection of one kind of charge can not exist therefore we need the other charge to b alance it out.

Answer 7

atoms r neutral.i.e. there should be an equal no. of opp. charges.so if protons r +vely charged then electrons must be -vely charged.since there are 3 sub-particles protons(+),neutrons(chargeless) n' electrons(so they r-)

Answer 8

coz they r required 2 neutralise t +ve charge of protons