• Question: what is an Atom

    Asked by to Joe, Juan, Kate, Rory, Rosie on 21 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rosie Coates

      Rosie Coates answered on 21 Mar 2014:

      Hi @pinkster,

      wow- that is a great question… Its a tough one to explain though!

      Have you ever heard of the periodic table? Well, this is basically a list of all of the smallest possible building blocks of everything on earth. These building blocks are also called atoms. You can check out the periodic table here: http://www.ptable.com/

      These atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. These all have different charges. Neutrons are neutral, protons are positive (+1) and electrons are negative (-1).

      What an atom really wants is to be neutrally charged, or have no charge at all… This means that if an atom has 1 proton it will have 1 electron (this makes sense if we think that 1-1=0).

      An example of this is hydrogen which is H on the periodic table. It has a proton number of 1 so we know it has 1 proton; this means that it also has 1 electron.

      I hope this answers your question @pinkster?!

Comments