What Does Empty Space in an Atom Consist Of?
MassEnergy storageRoom to moveFirst of all lets look at mass. Einstein once too a block of iron and heated it up. What he found was interesting. The block of hot iron weighed more, and took up more space. It had gained mass.
The iron atoms had gained mass in the form of heat energy. But where is this energy stored, the electrons have the same charge, and the nucleus had the same charge. But the electrons had moved to a higher level and the spaces inside the atom had expanded.
So this is where the energy goes, into the void or empty space of an atom.If this space was nothing, then it could be filled with stuff. But atoms hold their ground they hold their form and you have special bonds happen between atoms. Electrons can move from one level to the next, and spin. Without this space atoms could not function.So this space in an atom is fundamental to the atoms abilities to behave like an atom.
• Other Questions
How do hydrogen, deuterium and tritium differ?
Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen. Atomic isotopes have the same number of protons, but differ in the number of neutrons. All isotopes of hydrogen have a single proton. There are seven known hydrogen isotopes.
Hydrogen is the only element whose common isotopes have different names in use today: protium (no neutrons, what you would call normal hydrogen), deuterium (one neutron), and tritium (two neutrons). The other four hydrogen isotopes are extremely short-lived and do not have special names.Deuterium is about twice as heavy as protium, and tritium about three times as heavy.
Protium and deuterium can be used in discharge lamps and other gas-filled tubes. The colors produced by discharge lamps are close, but different.H2O is fairly common on the planet. However, about 1 in 7,000 of these molecules is actually DOH (or D2O). You can drink D2O in moderation without any harm. Tritium is mildly radioactive, with a 12 year half-life. There are minute quantities naturally. Drinking a glasss of T2O is ill-advised, but everyone ingests extremely minute quantities regularly, without harm.
Deuterium and tritium are used in fusion research (turning D and T into heavier atoms, such as helium). The energy required to get them to fuse is amongst the lowest. Although fusion in the sun starts with protium, it is not used in earth-based fusion because the energy requirements are much, much higher.
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Is electron a "point particle" as assumed in Quantum Mechanics?Nowhere it is formally claimed that an electron (or any other fundamental particle) is a point--that is, that a fundamental particle has 0 size. What is known is that a description of a fundamental particle can ignore its size (and thus regard it as 0) without measurable effects on the computations deriving from its other, measurable, properties and interactions.That's really all there is to it. We have no idea as to whether a fundamental particle has a size, or whether talking about its size has any meaning at all. What we know is that fundamental particles, like the electron, have no measurable size; and that's because we've been trying hard for decades to measure their size, and no matter how carefully we try and what methods we use, we get a size that's smaller than the error inherent in the measurements. And that error is way smaller than the size of a nucleus, or even a single proton. Which we can measure, using variants of the same methods we employ with electrons, and obtain results significantly above the inherent errors.
The bottom, practical line boils down to:nwe don't know;we mostly don't care;in the case of fundamental particles, having a size (in so far as it is smaller than our error limits) doesn't change the results.Make of this what you want.This answer cannot substitute a proper professional evaluation.Is electron a "point particle" as assumed in Quantum Mechanics?.
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What will happen to our sun after it burns all of its hydrogen?The sun will not burn all of its hydrogen, or even close to it.Think of fusion as a push and pull against gravity. Gravity wants to crush all mass into a single point. Fusion wants to blow everything off into a giant cloud.So when you have a lot of mass, (like the sun) gravity pushes hard enough on the atoms to force them to fuse, which releases an awful lot of energy pushing back against gravity. Eventually all the inner pieces become incredibly hard to fuse (even though there is still an awful lot of hydrogen in the upper layers, it isnt close enough to the core to fuse). So gravity crushes it down, and down, until finally even those inner layers are forced to fuse. Since these atoms are so massive they release a lot more energy, so much so that the gravity crushing down on the outer layers (where all the hydrogen is) is overcome by the energy of the fusion and the outer layer containing the vast majority of hydrogen is blown away. At this point the sun will be a white dwarf with little to no hydrogen in it.
This is common for all stars, the vast (vast) majority of hydrogen is never fused. Its blown around in supernovas and nebulas and red giants but not fused
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How does the same process that makes planets also make stars?It is amazing how the process unfolds - to form a star, you start with a large cloud of gas and dust, and once it starts to coalesce, it grows a central mass that keeps accumulating more gas, and more gas, then gets to the threshold of a minimal 0.08% of the Suns mass to begin the gravitational collapse and the ignition of fusion. Where the cloud is much larger than minimal more and more gas accumulates to make a more massive star, perhaps like the Sun, or, for example, two Solar masses to make a star like Sirius.
The onset of fusion begins the down clock on the remaining gas and dust in the proto planetary disk. All while the star was forming, lesser objects were also forming in the disk itself, and the more and more they grew they became more massive. Once the star ignites, though, the new stellar wind starts to drive the extra gas / dust away, so that the planets will never accumulate as much gas and dust to become even marginal stars, but will remain planets (big and small). The biggest planets (since they were in the process of gaining more gas before they were shut down) are gas giants (our Jupiter and Saturn); the smaller planets stopped growing at the rocky planet stage (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars)
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Itu2019s accepted that the universe will exist forever. But wonu2019t we run out of hydrogen at some point in the future so there will be no stars? Or is there a natural process of fission that Iu2019m not aware of?Its not accepted that the universe will exist forever, at least by physicists and cosmologists. There are various theories for how it will end, but most experts agree that it will end.The most popular theories are (least popular first):The Big Crunch - gravity wins, and the universes expansion is reversed, and it all falls in towards each other, getting very hot as it does so, towards the end.
The Big Freeze - closest to what you were saying: all stars use up their fuel, and turn into white dwarfs, then eventually (after an incredibly long time - hundreds of billions of years) cool down and turn into black dwarfs - basically cold lumps of matter. At this point the whole universe is in a state of maximum entropy, ie everywhere is at the same temperature (very cold).The Big Rip - the expansion of space keeps accelerating until the lambda-force (the theorised dark energy that is causing the expansion to accelerate) is so strong that it pulls apart all matter, down to the fundamental particle level.
The Big Rip is (I think) the current favourite theory, and also (I think) the one that would happen soonest out of the three. Theyre all tied into the expansion rate of the universe, and so can be neatly summarised in this spacetime diagram:
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Why do people say nuclear bombs are fake?Re. radioactive fallout: the strongest isotopes decay the fastest, giving the 710 rule- after seven times the amount of time has passed, the remaining radioactivity will be 1/10 as strong. So even after a large release of radioactive material such as a nuclear explosion or a reactor accident, the level of radioactivity will after weeks or months be too low to produce acute symptoms of radiation exposure.The problem after that is long-term chronic exposure. Two radioactive isotopes typically released from nuclear fission are Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. These have half-lives (how long it takes for half to decay away) of about 29-30 years. Because of the chemistry of strontium and cesium, any taken into the body will tend to remain there, and radioactive material taken into the body is far more harmful than material outside. If an area is contaminated with fallout, eating any plants or animals that grow there could lead to unhealthy levels of radioactive material within the body, potentially causing cancer, suppressed immune systems or birth defects. Unborn and young children are especially vulnerable, worsened by the fact that strontium and cesium become concentrated in milk.For example, the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima actually support much wildlife now that humans have been evacuated; but in both locations wild boars were found to have levels of cesium too high for them to be safe to eat.
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Is there any possibility that after billions or trillions of years, the Sun will lose its heat energy and disappear from the universe?The Sun is a star, and like all stars, it converts hydrogen, the most common element in the universe (by far), into helium, a process called fusion, which releases enormous quantities of gamma rays. By the time it takes for those gamma rays to reach the surface from the core where they are produced, it takes about 100,000 years in the case of our Sun, they will have degraded from high energy gamma to relatively low energy x-rays, UV rays, visible light, IR rays (heat) and microwaves.As a star consumes its hydrogen it gets hotter and hotter which accelerates the fusion process and at a certain point, the hydrogen is used up and the star collapses in the core and expands at the surface. It wonu2019t disappear (eventually it does) right away, but after a few billion years it will no longer be able to provide enough light and heat to sustain life on Earth. However, long before then, the increased heat of the Sun will have evaporated and blown away all the air and water, sterilizing the planet, mountains will melt into valleys and the surface of the Earth will resemble a glass ball with pock marks from space rocks which will reach the surface as there will be no air to stop them.Is there any possibility that after billions or trillions of years, the Sun will lose its heat energy and disappear from the universe?.
