Atomic Structure

What are atoms made of?

An atom is the smallest piece of any element. But it turns out that all atoms are made
of even smaller particles! These are called subatomic particles. Let’s take a closer
look inside an atom…

There are three types of particles in the nucleus:

protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and
Neutrons make up the centre of the atom, which is
called the nucleus. Electrons are found around the
outside of the nucleus, in orbitals.

Most of the mass of an atom is in the nucleus – electrons are very, very light. Protons
and Neutrons have a similar mass. Another property of these particles in called
charge. Protons have a positive charge, and electrons have a negative charge.
Neutrons have no charge.

Particle Relative Mass Charge Location

Proton 1 +1 Nucleus
Neutron 1 0 Nucleus
Electron 0 -1 Orbitals

What makes an Element?

Different elements have different masses – this is because they have different
numbers of protons and neutrons. More specifically, a certain element has a specific
number of protons. In fact, we can figure out how many of each subatomic particle is
inside each atom by looking at the periodic table:
Atomic Number
The two important numbers are atomic number and mass number. Notice
that carbon has an atomic number of 6. This means every atom of carbon
has 6 protons. If an atom does not have 6 protons, it is not a carbon atom!
Atoms also have a neutral charge. This means there must be the same
Mass Number number of electrons as there are protons – 6, for a Carbon atom.

Carbon’s mass number is 12 (ignore the decimals for now). This means it has 12
particles with mass. Remember that electrons are very light – we don’t count them as
having mass. So the mass number is the total number of protons and neutrons. For
carbon, we had 6 protons, so there must be 12 – 6 = 6 neutrons.
Electronic Structure

It turns out there are rules about how the electrons

are arranged in their orbitals. There are layers of
orbitals, like layers on an onion. The first orbital, the
closest to the nucleus, can only hold two
electrons. The next two orbitals can hold up to
eight electrons. The last orbital holds two electrons again. This is
true, at least, for the first 20 elements. Think 2,8,8,2. For example,
Diagram of a
Chlorine has 17 electrons. Its electron arrangement is 2,8,7. Chlorine Atom