Atomic nucleus is positively charged and electrons are negatively charged.What makes them stay apart?

Answer 1

I've found three types of answers to this question:
1. You may have heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? It says that a particle like an electron can not have a precise position and precise velocity at the same time. If the electron were to collapse into the nucleus, then the position would be very precisely located, so correspondingly, the momentum would have to fluctuate widely. A large momentum would then pull the electron back out of the nucleus.

2. The electron would have to give off the energy from when it collapsed into the nucleus - just like it gives off a photon when it falls from a higher energy level to a lower energy level. Apparently there is some problem with it not being able to do so, but I couldn't figure out exactly what the problem was.

3. I saw another answer that said the energy required to combine a electron and a proton (to make a neutron) is so huge that the electrostatic attraction isn't enough to actually combine them, so that in absence of a huge gravitational field, the electron would end up still being an electron - so I guess then hypothesis #1 would apply.

Answer 2

Electrons orbit around the nucleus. The nucleus trys to pull them toward it and the electrons "energy" acts like a force pushing it away from the nucleus ( think of sitting on a fast moving mary go round and the force you fell trying to push you off). Electrons can orbit the nucleus in several differerent levels and the energy each electron has determins what orbit level it is in. ( there are a few more rules governing this orbit level stuff but that is another story) If and electron obtains enough " energy" it can actualy break free from the nucleus and move to another atom. In fact it happens all the time.

Answer 3

Positive or negative is only a convention that is used for describing an electric current.
An electron could have also have been called positively charge and the proton negatively charged.Just like answers can be called negative or positive,however they are really answers.

If protons and electrons are electrical masses then they would follows the same laws of gravitation and Einstein general relativity would also apply to the electrical masses as well.

Pressure(heat pressure) from inside the atomic containment keeps the external electrostaic gravity pressure from squeezing them together.That is why the electrons and protons never really kiss.

The descritpion of the magnetude of charge is the same for both the electrons and protons; except the charge potentials are not the same.

Answer 4

That's a deep question with no simple answer. The *traditional* answer, which is *wrong*, is that it's held in orbit. The Earth and Moon have an attraction between them, and the Earth and Sun have an attraction between them, but the moon doesn't fall into the Earth, nor does the Earth fall into the Sun. That's because the force law of gravity allows for stable orbits in the shape of ellipses, a fact which was proved by Newton in his investigation of gravity. So our original model for the atom was the "Rutherford model", which had the electron orbiting the nucleus as an ellipse. That model lasted for less than a year before it had to be replaced. Why? Because we know something important about electrons that accelerate: they give off radiation (via the Larmor formula -- wiki it!), which by conservation of energy means that they must spiral inward. We have to deal with this in cyclotrons, for example. You can calculate the lifetime of such a model with the Larmor formula and a little bit of calculus, and you find out that it *is* a finite time before the electron spirals into the nucleus, and that it's on the order of a couple nanoseconds. We replaced this model, which is wrong, with quantum mechanics, a very strange but very precise theory that we've since verified to amazing degrees of accuracy. Quantum mechanics, for example, predicts the entire structure of the periodic table: with the first row adding 2 new columns, and the second row adding 6, and the third level adding 10, and the fourth row adding 14. (Divide by 2 to get 1, 3, 5, 7, respectively. But before quantum mechanics, nobody knew why these additions were each two times the successive odd numbers.) To give you a sample tasting: in the quantum mechanics version, the electron isn't in one specific point: its wavefunction is distributed all around the nucleus, and it stays that way unless it's "observed." (What does "observation" mean on a microscopic level? Can electrons "observe" themselves? Isn't the proton "observing" the electron? A lot of physicists have worried a lot about that sort of thing, but let's just cop-out and say that "observation" is something which happens when you, with some big machine, try to figure out what's happening on some small level.) There are some very curious results from quantum mechanics: for example, the lowest "stable orbit" of a hydrogen atom doesn't have any angular momentum: which means that it's *not an orbit at all*: the electron literally isn't "going around" the atom in any meaningful sense. Why is this true? Well, in quantum mechanics, things *really* don't like to be in one place at one time -- a fact called the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle": if you manage to confine the wavefunction for a particle to a small space, the momentum of that particle becomes erratic and indeterminate, so that it starts bouncing about all parts of that space, looking for a way out. It can even sometimes "tunnel" through potential barriers, appearing on the other side of a "wall" that it shouldn't be able to get through, if the wall isn't high enough. These are weird things that happen because waves and particles are viewed as complementary ideas in quantum mechanics: in QM, the electron has a wavelength inversely proportional to its momentum, so when you squash it into a small space, you squash its wavelength, too, which makes its momentum very large. In that fact, you have your answer: If the electron fell into the nucleus, what that would mean is, all of the wave function was focused in the nucleus. But if that were true, then the electron's wavefunction would be trying to get out of the nucleus, because the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that its momentum would skyrocket and become very erratic. So the stable state has to be somewhere in the middle: it has to be at just that distance where the tendency to "fall into" the nucleus and the tendency to "avoid being trapped" exactly balance each other out. That distance is called the "Bohr radius" -- look it up on Wikipedia.

Answer 5

the electrons has discrete energies,(hence they have descrete energy levels), and are always moving around the nucleus, it this movement and the energy that prevents the nucleus from pulling them.

Answer 6

The electrons flow in an opposite direction. For every action there is an equal and oppposite reaction applies here.

Answer 7

Some kind of nuclear force. I forgot the name of it. It's been 4 years since I took chemistry, but that should get you started.

Answer 8

The nucleus is already full, therefore it cannot take on any more particles.