Fun Facts

15 Interesting Facts About Atoms

1. There are three parts to an atom. Protons have a positive electrical charge and are found together with neutrons (no electrical charge) in the nucleus of each atom. Negatively charged electrons orbit the nucleus.

2. Atoms are the smallest particles that make up elements. Each element contains a different number of protons. For example, all hydrogen atoms have one proton while all carbon atoms have six protons. Some matter consists of one type of atom (e.g., gold), while other matter is made of atoms bonded together to form compounds (e.g., sodium chloride).

3. Atoms are mostly empty space. The nucleus of an atom is extremely dense and contains nearly all of the mass of each atom. Electrons contribute very little mass to the atom (it takes 1,836 electrons to equal the size of a proton) and orbit so far away from the nucleus that each atom is 99.9% empty space. If the atom was the size of a sports arena, the nucleus would be the size of a pea. Although the nucleus is much denser compared with the rest of the atom, it too consists mainly of empty space.

4. There are over 100 different kinds of atoms. About 92 of them occur naturally, while the remainder are made in labs. The first new atom made by man was technetium, which has 43 protons. New atoms can be made by adding more protons to an atomic nucleus. However, these new atoms (elements) are unstable and decay into smaller atoms instantaneously. Usually, we only know a new atom was created by identifying the smaller atoms from this decay.

5. The components of an atom are held together by three forces. Protons and neutrons are held together by the strong and weak nuclear forces. Electrical attraction holds electrons and protons. While electrical repulsion repels protons away from each other, the attracting nuclear force is much stronger than electrical repulsion. The strong force that binds together protons and neutrons is 1,038 times more powerful than gravity, but it acts over a very short range, so particles need to be very close to each other to feel its effect.

6. The word “atom” comes from the Greek word for “uncuttable” or “undivided.” The name comes from the 5th century BCE Greek philosopher Democritus, who believed matter consisted of particles that could not be cut into smaller particles. For a long time, people believed atoms were the fundamental “uncuttable” unit of matter. While atoms are the building blocks of elements, they can be divided into still smaller particles. Also, nuclear fission and nuclear decay can break atoms into smaller atoms.

7. Atoms are very small. The average atom is about one-tenth of a billionth of a meter across. The largest atom (cesium) is approximately nine times bigger than the smallest atom (helium).

8.Although atoms are the smallest unit of an element, they consist of even tinier particles called quarks and leptons. An electron is a lepton. Protons and neutrons consist of three quarks each.

9.The most abundant type of atom in the universe is the hydrogen atom. Nearly 74% of the atoms in the Milky Way galaxy are hydrogen atoms.

10.You have around 7 billion billion billion atoms in your body, yet you replace about 98% of them every year—a fascinating fact abut atoms!

11.Atoms are the extremely small particles that are the basic building blocks of ordinary matter. Atoms can join together to form molecules, which make up most objects. Different elements (e.g. oxygen, carbon, uranium) are made up of different types of atoms. An atom is the smallest unit of an element that will behave as that element. Atoms consist of an extremely small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons. Although typically the nucleus is less than one ten-thousandth the size of the atom, the nucleus contains more that 99.9% of the mass of the atom. Nuclei are made of positively charged protonsand electrically neutral neutrons held together by a nuclear force. This force is much stronger than the electrostatic force that binds electrons to the nucleus, but its range is limited to distances of the order of 1 x 10-15 meters.

12.Atoms of the same element can have different number of neutrons and they are called isotopes of that element.

13.At present there are 118 known elements which are typically displayed on the periodic table of the elements. Elements with atomic numbers 1 – 98 have all been shown to exist in nature while elements with atomic number 99 – 118 have only ever been produced artificially.

14.Over 99.9% of an atom is empty space. A single drop of water contains about two sextillion (2 x 10^21) atoms of oxygen. Atoms can combine to form molecules, and the number of protons determines the element

15.We’re all connected to the past:
Some atoms in your body might have been part of historical figures like Shakespeare or Genghis Khan! 

Atoms can form ions:
When atoms gain or lose electrons, they become charged particles called ions.

7 Unique  Fun Facts about the scientists that helped in atomic structure development

1. John Dalton
He was colorblind, and in fact, colorblindness was once called Daltonism because he was the first to study and describe it scientifically.

2. Ernest Rutherford
He’s known as the “father of nuclear physics” and once described his famous gold foil experiment results by saying it was like firing a bullet at tissue paper and having it bounce back.

3. Democritus
He was a Greek philosopher (not a scientist in the modern sense) who first proposed the idea of atoms over 2,000 years ago, he thought everything was made of tiny, indivisible particles.

4. J.J. Thomson
He discovered the electron in 1897, but he also won the Nobel Prize in Physics for studying electricity in gases—not directly for finding the electron.

5. Niels Bohr
He loved soccer and even played as a goalkeeper in his youth. Later, he created the Bohr model of the atom, showing electrons moving in orbits around the nucleus.

6. James Chadwick
He discovered the neutron in 1932, and interestingly, he was so modest that many of his colleagues didn’t realize at first how big his discovery was.

7. Erwin Schrödinger
He came up with the famous thought experiment “Schrödinger’s cat”, where a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time, an illustration of quantum weirdness.

Extra fun fact: Niels Bohr once got a house in Denmark with free beer running from the pipes, a gift from the Carlsberg Brewery because he lived next door to them