For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[kerbiloid]

It's the orbit-like set of possible electron positions around the atom core.

The electron is an electron of Schroedinger, it presents in every of them at some probability, so you can't just spot it.

The closest way to describe its position change is like it orbits around the core as one charged particle around another one.

That's all you can get:
https://phys.org/news/2008-02-electron.html

[AHHans]

7 hours ago, Souptime said:

What the heck is an electron orbital?

It's the energy state of an electron in an atom. According to the Bohr model, an atom consists of a small dense core and a number of electrons "orbiting" around it. In reality - or at least the quantum physical model of atoms - it is way more complicated, among other things an electron isn't at a single, well-defined point in space at any time. So:

8 hours ago, Souptime said:

why can scientists just spot the electron?

The sort answer is: you can't! The long answer is: Quantum mechanics (AKA: I don't want to go down that rabbit hole here. )

While the Bohr model doesn't capture the whole complexity of how electrons in an atom behave, it is good enough to explain many effects. Which is why thinking in terms of "electron orbitals" may be useful on occasion.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Artemis space suits - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/artemis-moonwalkers-spacesuits-will-not-be-ready-before-2025/  yep - lots of cooks in the kitchen 

Bepi-Colombo flyby of Venus - https://www.space.com/bepicolombo-venus-close-flyby-video-august-2021 (mostly confirmed that the spacecraft is operating and the planet remains spherical 

 

Edited August 12, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Shpaget]

A billion bucks to develop the suits? 

Maybe I should have gone for taylors.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

The obvious counter-argument against my sniping at 'Traditional Aerospace' and 'Government funded high - tech jobs-work' programs*... As brought into focus by a Russian engineer /General Director:

"... By the way, if humanity stops making smartphones for a couple of years, then we will forget how to make them and it will be very difficult to restore the processes. That is precisely why the Americans cannot build the Saturn-5 rocket. They have blueprints, knowledge, but that's not what you went, took blueprints from the shelf and made. It's a whole ecosystem. It's the same with Soviet achievements. Sometimes it's cheaper to make something new"

https://tass.ru/kosmos/12115081

So there you have it - sometimes it is worth keeping people employed so they remain current and you don't have to reinvent the wheel.  The ecosystem breaks down - and while you still have smart people... They recognize that it's likely better to move forward with a new design than to try to recreate the success of the past. 

 

*comments made in several other subforums 

[MKI]

1 minute ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

They recognize that it's likely better to move forward with a new design than to try to recreate the success of the past. 

Plus, who doesn't want to do greenfield projects ;D

[Souptime]

7 hours ago, AHHans said:

It's the energy state of an electron in an atom. According to the Bohr model, an atom consists of a small dense core and a number of electrons "orbiting" around it. In reality - or at least the quantum physical model of atoms - it is way more complicated, among other things an electron isn't at a single, well-defined point in space at any time. So:

The sort answer is: you can't! The long answer is: Quantum mechanics (AKA: I don't want to go down that rabbit hole here. )

While the Bohr model doesn't capture the whole complexity of how electrons in an atom behave, it is good enough to explain many effects. Which is why thinking in terms of "electron orbitals" may be useful on occasion.

So basically an electron is a 5 year old who ate too much sugar and is zipping around the place, not able to be spotted in one point?

[kerbiloid]

17 minutes ago, Souptime said:

So basically an electron is a 5 year old who ate too much sugar and is zipping around the place, not able to be spotted in one point?

Wasps are electrons!

[AHHans]

2 hours ago, Souptime said:

So basically an electron is a 5 year old who ate too much sugar and is zipping around the place, not able to be spotted in one point?

Something like that.

But I don't think the hyperactive 5yo model of electrons is going to find much traction in practical physics.

 

[Souptime]

2 minutes ago, AHHans said:

Something like that.

But I don't think the hyperactive 5yo model of electrons is going to find much traction in practical physics.

 

How about the hide n' seek model

We know they're in the house, but it'll take a while to find them

[AHHans]

2 minutes ago, Souptime said:

We know they're in the house, but it'll take a while to find them

I also don't think this will be used to describe electrons. Not in the least because that is lived reality for pencils, screwdrivers, calipers, lab notes, and way to many other items in most physics labs.

[StrandedonEarth]

14 minutes ago, AHHans said:

Something like that.

But I don't think the hyperactive 5yo model of electrons is going to find much traction in practical physics.

 

More like the caffeinated squirrels model?

[kerbiloid]

Wack-a-'ctron.

Spoiler

 

[Terwin]

On 8/11/2021 at 9:59 PM, Souptime said:

What the heck is an electron orbital? why can scientists just spot the electron?

Electrons are in shells, sub-shells, and orbitals.

When an atom gains an electron, that electron wants to be as close as possible to the nucleus, just like two magnets want to be close together.

But, even with very tiny things, you can only hold so many of them in a given area, so the more electrons an atom has, the further away the new electron will be stuck(because all of the closer spots already have an electron).

The largest level of this is shells, which is basically how much energy is tying the electron to the atom, which can be measured by how much energy it takes to knock it loose.

If an electron is in the inner-most shell, it has the tightest binding and takes the most energy to knock loose, and if it is in the 3rd or 4th shell, it is considered further away and takes less energy to knock loose(sort of like how a low orbit takes more energy to reach escape velocity than a high orbit).

 

While at one point Atoms were considered the smallest discrete element of matter(and thus the name 'Atom' = undividable), we now have seen deeper to the point where we can now detect discrete levels of energy.  Both in nature and in the lab, we see these discrete levels of energy and cannot seem to find or manufacture energy levels between these levels, making us believe that they may be the smallest possible quantity of energy, 'quanta' for short(and thus 'Quantum mechanics').

Because electron energy levels relative to an atom are small enough to be a counted number of quanta, you cannot have an arbitrary number of 'orbits' like you could with a planet, just ones that exactly match a whole number of quanta.

From what I can see, shells are more or less the energy level/number of quanta, and sub-shells and orbitals are classifications of electrons within those shells based on how similar they are, with electrons in the same orbital being the most similar, differing only in their 'spin'. (and because there are only two types of 'spin', an orbital can hold at most 2 electrons)

Just like with planets, larger 'orbits' can hold more electrons, with the smallest 'orbit' consisting of just a single orbital with it's pair of electrons.

Source material/further reading:

https://pediaa.com/difference-between-shell-subshell-and-orbital/

https://socratic.org/questions/difference-between-shell-and-subshell

 

note: in most cases, when looking at an atom, scientists look at the mass, charge and chemical properties to determine how many neutrons, protons, and electrons are present, as looking at the nucleus directly requires something like an electron microscope(sort of like a tiny radar throwing individual electrons and watching how they curve or bounce).  Obviously this method does not work with individual electrons, but those have enough of a charge that they just compare the current charge to the expected charge with zero electrons and calculate the number of electrons from there.

It is much easier to use the periodic table of elements(to match chemical behavior to a given column) combined with the approximate mass of the atom(to identify the row) to determine the number of protons, then just looking at the charge to calculate the number of electrons.

I think I did see one news article that claimed IBM was able to image a single electron, but to me the 'image' just looked like a single peak on an otherwise flat 3-d graph.

[K^2]

On 8/11/2021 at 7:59 PM, Souptime said:

What the heck is an electron orbital? why can scientists just spot the electron?

Because it's a wave, like all particles. And orbitals are just a kind of standing wave you get in central potential.

It's like if you grab a string, you can make a wave that's just a single arch going back and forward, or two arches with a node in the middle, or three arches with two nodes, etc. These are the harmonics or standing waves. Orbitals are the equivalent for electron waves near an atomic nucleus.

[Jacke]

On 8/12/2021 at 2:59 AM, Souptime said:

What the heck is an electron orbital? why can scientists just spot the electron?

Because how things are at the atomic and subatomic scales don't act the way things do at the scales you're used to.

Things are seen because they either emit light or some other radiation that can be detected or they reflect/absorb and reradiate the light or other radiation and that light or other radiation is detected.

"Illuminate" an electron with a single photon and it's no longer where it was--unless the electron was bound to an  atom or molecule and the energy of the photon was less than the amount needed to raise the energy level of the electron to the next orbital.

The best experiment to get a better feel for how things work and how it's not like it is at larger scales is the famous Double-slit experiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Things are different there.  More topics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave–particle_duality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_orbital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_hybridisation

[Souptime]

hmm... alright then, the quantum world is weird

BUT

what if we made an atom the size of like a soccer ball, how would it behave like then? and what would it look like?

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Souptime said:

hmm... alright then, the quantum world is weird

BUT

what if we made an atom the size of like a soccer ball, how would it behave like then? and what would it look like?

 

Probably impossible.

I honestly think scale matters. The universe has it's own code, for things to behave a certain why depending on density and scale.

Once you reach a certain scale you no longer have an a atom.

 

At macroscopic levels you could say the milky way is like an atom and the stars and planets are like the protons and electrons. Even though they truly are not.

 

I doubt in the same way a scaled up atom would behave like a real one, since nothing I know of behaves the same scaled up or down.

 

Scaling up increases inertia, scaling down lowers it.

[kerbiloid]

I'm afraid, to "look" it should interact with electromagnetic waves, so in the best case it will look like a transparent fuzzy cloud of nothing with invisible nothing inside.

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, Souptime said:

hmm... alright then, the quantum world is weird

BUT

what if we made an atom the size of like a soccer ball, how would it behave like then? and what would it look like?

Well the challenge is to make it  It would require reaching an very high number of islands of stability, if they exist I don't expect them to continue forever. 

[SOXBLOX]

Well, would the strong nuclear force even operate at that scale? That would be a pretty big nucleus...

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Time Crystal - perpetual motion machine or loophole in the 2d law? 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-time-crystal-built-using-googles-quantum-computer-20210730/

[K^2]

9 hours ago, Souptime said:

what if we made an atom the size of like a soccer ball, how would it behave like then? and what would it look like?

If you tried to build it out of normal protons and neutrons, it'd turn into a chunk of neutron matter, absorbing most of the electrons. A few electrons that remain would most likely act as if they are inside a (super?)conductor. That is to say, they'd still be waves, and actually way less localized than they are in an ordinary atom.

[Jacke]

10 hours ago, Souptime said:

what if we made an atom the size of like a soccer ball, how would it behave like then? and what would it look like?

There can't be atoms the size of a soccer ball (about 22cm across).  As other have mentioned, you can have neutronium--material only made of close packed neutrons--that size, but it only exists under the pressures in neutron stars.

You could make up a scaled-up model, as often there's a scaled-down model made of the Solar System, but especially for atoms and smaller, that's a bad idea, because it makes you think of it as something like the ~1m sized stuff around us, where things of atomic sized and smaller behave very differently.  You can't think of scaling the atoms without scaling the wavelengths of light, which are larger than the atoms.  So, even the "scaled up" atom couldn't be seen in the usual sense.  (Scanning tunnelling microscopes "see" atoms as a voltage measuring quantum tunnelling electrons coming from the observed material's atoms.)

So we use numbers, usually in scientific notation.  Ie. the soccer ball above, 22cm across, can be said to be 0.22m across, or 2.2x10^-1.  When those exponents on the ten's get very small or very large, it's easier to use them to understand things.

Atomic sizes in a quote from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_radius

Quote

Under most definitions the radii of isolated neutral atoms range between 30 and 300 pm (trillionths of a meter), or between 0.3 and 3 ångströms. Therefore, the radius of an atom is more than 10,000 times the radius of its nucleus (1–10 fm),^[2] and less than 1/1000 of the wavelength of visible light (400–700 nm).

The diameters are twice the radii, so between 0.6 and 6 ångströms, or 6x10^-11 to 6x10^-10m across.

For atomic nuclear sizes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_nucleus

Quote

The diameter of the nucleus is in the range of 1.7566 fm (1.7566×10⁻¹⁵ m) for hydrogen (the diameter of a single proton) to about 11.7142 fm for uranium.^[7] These dimensions are much smaller than the diameter of the atom itself (nucleus + electron cloud), by a factor of about 26,634 (uranium atomic radius is about 156 pm (156×10⁻¹² m))^[8] to about 60,250 (hydrogen atomic radius is about 52.92 pm).^[a]

The atomic nucleus is about 1.8x10^-15 to 1.2x10^-14m across.  As in the quote, that's smaller than the atoms by a ratio of about 26,00 to 60,000.

Edited August 14, 2021 by Jacke

[DDE]

A random musing at the intersection of so many topics.

Whenever I built a ship (a three-seat capsule and an SM) and a space station module or a standalone Salyut in KSP, despite the station being much larger in size (usually thanks to the Mobile Lab), even if I carefully trimmed the size of the SM's propellant tanks, the ship would usually end up heavier than the space station.

Why could that be? IRL, where does the additional mass of a station comes from to merit a Soyuz-Proton difference?