• Question: What would happen if atoms touched?

    Asked by anon-277850 on 22 Jan 2021.
    • Photo: Graham Shields

      Graham Shields answered on 22 Jan 2021:

      Hello Big brain (good name), Atoms are mostly empty space. At their centre is a tiny dense nucleus, but most of the atom is where electrons whiz around. Those electrons can be given to or shared with other atoms and so in some sense atoms are always touching at their edges, sometimes linking to other atoms to form bonds, and sometimes just bouncing away. That’s chemistry. Does that answer your question?

    • Photo: Michael Nolan

      Michael Nolan answered on 22 Jan 2021:

      Atoms make bonds between each other without “touching” and I;m not even sure our everyday meaning of “touching” can be used here.
      However, if we can get to conditions of extreme pressure and temperature then you can force atoms to get closer and closer and the simplest atom, hydrogen (one electron and one proton) goes from a gas to a liquid metal. I know some colleagues who looked at this and predicted this form many years ago if you squeeze hydrogen enough. https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/09aug_juno3 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0002104
      Other things that could happen include – stripping atoms of their electrons (there is enough energy available to do this), nuclear fusion, which is how a star makes elements heavier than helium.

      Strange things can happen at the atomic level when you increase pressure and temperature!

    • Photo: Manuel Kober-Czerny

      Manuel Kober-Czerny answered on 26 Jan 2021:

      Hi,
      I’ll try to answer this as best as I can. First, as Graham and Michael have answered, all atoms are very close to each other in chemical bonds (you can imagine it like them holding hands). And sometimes you need some energy to get them to hold hands and sometimes they release a lot of energy when they hold hands (like in an explosion).
      But, you can use a lot of energy to force them even closer together and when they ‘touch’ they will fuse together (sort of melt together). We call that nuclear fusion and it releases a loooooot of energy. This is what happens in our sun. It is basically a huge rock that is so heavy that it pushes atoms in its center so close together that they fuse together. And the energy that is released from that reaction generates thousands of degrees of heat and glowing and that is why we can see the sun, even during daytime! Quite cool I think 😀

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