Thread: do protons circle electrons?

you know the way the moon goes around the earth but the earth also goes around the moon, its just the mass difference means that middle point is closer to earth than it is to the moon so its seems like that the moon just goes around the earth.

is it the same with electrons and protons?obviously the heavier atoms are a little complicated but lets say for a hydrogen atom that has no neutrons/1 neutron/more than one? does the nucleus and the electron circle each other? with the centre point closer to the nucleus?

Electrons don't really "orbit" around a nucleus in the same way that planets orbit each other (although it's pretty common for low-level textbooks to give people that impression). The behavior of electrons around a nucleus can only really be described with quantum physics.

No..It would if electrons and protons were lumps of matter but since their not it doesnt



an electron is no more a ball of stuff than the electricity in your computer is, the pictures in books are simply a way of showing it in a way everyone can understand based on some of it's properties


an electron can orbit an atom, it can also pass straight through the atom as well as move to a completely different spot without traversing the distance between, it can also exist in more than one place at any one time and can instead orbit different atoms

the diagrams of their orbitals simply show where the energy we dubbed an electron is most likely to be at any given time