An Atom Is Electrically Neutral Because



Answer 1:

By definition, an atom is electrically neutral (i.e. has the same number of protons as it does electrons, plus some number of neutrons depending on the isotope). If a species were charged, it is referred to as an ion (cation for positively charged and anion for negatively charged species), also by definition.

Atoms are electrically neutral because they have equal numbers of protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged). If an atom gains or loses one or more electrons, it becomes an ion. If it gains one or more electrons, it now carries a net negative charge, and is thus 'anionic. Electrically Neutral. The Bond Between an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom is a covalent bond because there is unequal sharing of the electron pair.

But this is probably not a very satisfying answer. (I personally find answers based on definitions pretty bland.) Perhaps an interesting follow up question is...

Polarity, in chemical bonding, the distribution of electrical charge over the atoms joined by the bond. While bonds between identical atoms such as two of hydrogen are electrically uniform in that both hydrogen atoms are electrically neutral, bonds between atoms of different elements are electrically inequivalent. Thomsons model of an atom According to Thomson, atom was in a spherical in shape which had positive charged particle sand negative charged particles equally distribution and hence it was electrically neutral. Its observation could be called as a plum pudding model or a watermelon.

Is the universe electrically neutral?

For many instances in science, we deal with systems where charge neutrality is very important.

Perhaps a common example you might be familiar with is table salt, NaCl. Before forming salt, both sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) are electrically neutral atoms. Then chlorine nabs an electron from a sodium because it is more energetically favorable for it to have an additional electron. You then have a Na+ cation and Cl- anion that combine into NaCl due to electrostatic attraction. Overall, NaCl is a neutral system (table salt doesn't shock you when you eat it... hopefully).

This property of electrical neutrality is also very important in the work that I do every day. I do computational research on crystals like NaCl where we calculate energies of a variety of sorts to understand the material. Part of calculating the total energy of a system for a crystal like NaCl involves the energy contribution that arises from Coulombic forces between every combination of Na+ and Cl- anion. This would mean figuring this out for something like 1023 ions (which is a lot). We do something a little more clever. NaCl is a crystal, which means it has a periodic (i.e. repeating) structure, so we only need to consider a unit cell, or small portion that can reproduce the entire crystal structure by translating it. But this means what we model is infinitely large materials. This is okay for bulk materials, since surface effects are small.

What is more worrying are those long range Coulombic forces. If we're not careful, we could end up with infinite energy! And that would be no good. This can be solved with a clever way of adding Coulombic forces (called Ewald summation) and a charge neutral unit cell.

An Atom Is Electrically Neutral Because *

But if many everyday things we are familiar with are electrically neutral, does this mean that the universe has to be electrically neutral?


What Makes Atoms Electrically Neutral

Maybe.

It's actually still an open research question. What do you think would happen if the universe were just slightly positively charged overall? This is different from being ionized- that just means there are positively and negatively charged particles. But do these particles have to just balance each out? You can follow an interesting discussion here or a pretty recent article about how the universe could be slightly positively charged (the math gets a little hairy towards the end, but there luckily is more exposition overall).

Hope this helps!
Best,

Explain why an atom is neutral ?

An Atom Is Electrically Neutral Because The

1 Answer

Because

Because it has the same number of Protons & Electrons.

Why Is An Atom Electrically Neutral Quizlet

Explanation:

An Atom Is Electrically Neutral Because Quizlet

Atoms are made up of positively charged particles called protons and negatively charged particles called electrons as well as non-charged particles called neutrons. The charge from a proton or electron are of equal strength, therefore if an atom has an equal number of protons and electrons, it will be electrically neutral.

However, atoms are not always electrically neutral, in which case they are called ions. An ion is an atom that has lost or gained electrons resulting in a positive charge (from losing electrons) or a negative charge (from gaining electrons).

Electrically Neutral Definition

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