Can you Discribe the shape of an Atom ?

Answer 1

Think 3 dimensionally and in your mind place 20 or so balls inside of a box.... each floating independently somewhere in this three dimensional area. Then connect them all with lines to one another. An atom looks something like this. Of course specific atoms have specific appearances. It would be like taking our solar system and making it microscopic.

Thats a premise of quantom cosmology... that we could be somebody elses atom and that our atoms could be somebody elses universe. It's pretty cool stuff.

Answer 2

Imagine an area the size of a major sports stadium like the Astrodome. 99% of the matter in an atom is in the nucleus. This would be a single pea suspended in the middle of the stadium. The electrons would be a thin (REALLY thin) cloud out at the peripheries of the stadium and their total matter amounts to almost nothing. In between there's just empty space. Since atoms are far smaller than the smallest wavelengths of light that we can see talking about their shape is kind of irrelevant. The old pictures of spheres with lines around them representing the orbits of electrons is a schematic, showing you basically how an atom works, not what it looks like. They have been able to photograph the effects of individual atoms on the space around them but you can never actually see an atom, only detect its presence.

Answer 3

Our ideas about the shapes of atoms have changed over the last few centuries...we've gone from little balls with hooks and latches, to a miniature "solar system", to the current quantum mechanical view of the atom. In the QM model, the atom can be described by an electron probability cloud surrounding the central nucleus. The electron doesn't actually exist in a definite place until someone makes a measurement...until then, all that exists is a probability for the electron that surrounds the nucleus. There are regions of high probability and regions of little or no probability. The shape of the probability cloud depends on things like the electron's energy and orbital angular momentum. Some clouds look somewhat like balls, others like disks or jars or dumbells. It all depends on what quantum state the individual electrons are in. Its a pretty abstract mathematical model.

Answer 4

What should be kept in mind is something called quantum jitter. That is, at the subatomic level (e.g., protons, neutrons, electrons) all particles vibrate. So we can't really fix where these particles are at any given moment. There is something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle you might want to look up regarding the location of subatomic particles. [See source.]

Anyway, because of quantum jitter, atoms are not a fixed shape...none of them is. As the protons and neutrons jitter about, the shapes of the cores (the nuclei) change. So the cores are like tight little clouds of particles.

On the other hand, the electrons also jitter, but they are less confined than the core stuff. So their clouds are much much bigger around the nuclei. The cloud densities create 3D probability density functions.

Where the most dense part of the cloud appears, relative to the core, depends on the energy level of the electron. Higher energy electrons will have their most dense probability density in close to the nucleus; while lower energy electrons will have their most dense clouds farther out.

[NB: The idea that an atom looks like the solar system is way outdated. That's called the Bohr model and for the most part that has been replaced by the quantum model I described above.]

Answer 5

"Shape" becomes a bit of a muffled idea when dealing with electron clouds. Structurally, an atom consists of a nucleus (tiny, and in the center) and associated electrons in orbit. The probability of finding an electron at a specific spot in space is determined by the electronic wavefunction for the atom. The general result is that (since orientation is not fixed) any real atom which is observed (assuming you could 'observe' the cloud somehow - really all we can do is measure the quantum numbers for its electrons) for all intents and purposes will be a ball. It will be fuzzy, without a well-defined edge, but spherical in nature.

Answer 6

A hydrogen atom consists of a nucleus of one proton in the middle and a spherical cloud where the single electron orbits. More complex atoms get more complex to describe because of the shape of the orbitals.

http://www.chemguide.co.uk/atoms/properties/atomorbs.html

Answer 7

http://www.orbitals.com/orb/index.html
http://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/orbitron/
http://www.chem.ufl.edu/~itl/ao_pict/ao_pict.html
http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~edudev/Orbitals/movie.html

Knock yourself out.

Or just solve the Schroedinger equation for a 1/r potential.

:-)

Answer 8

like the system of the solar system, I think.