Maize

Single atoms of platinum and palladium, magnified three million times, look like yellow dots in this picture taken with an electron microscope. The yellow areas with red or purple centers are clusters of atoms. Color was added electronically to improve the picture, as atoms themselves have no color.

📖 In short

The atom is the smallest piece that everything around us is built from: water, air, rocks, plants and your body too! Atoms are so tiny that millions of them would fit across the width of a single hair.

🤩 Did you know?

The smallest thing you can see with an ordinary microscope contains billions of atoms.
Protons and neutrons are made of smaller particles called quarks.
In Arabic, the word “dharra” (atom) means something tiny that can't be seen.
An atom can't be seen with an ordinary microscope, only with very powerful special ones.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Inside the atom

In the middle of an atom is a tiny nucleus with particles called protons and neutrons. Around the nucleus whiz even smaller particles called electrons, like bees around a hive.

🔍 Lots of empty space

An atom is mostly empty space! If we made an atom as big as a football field, the nucleus in the middle would be like a small pea.

💡 Kinds of atoms

There are many kinds of atoms, which scientists call elements, like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, iron and gold. Each element has its own number of protons.

🎯 Atoms join up

Atoms join together to make molecules. Two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom make a water molecule. In this way all substances are built from a few kinds of atoms, just as words are built from letters.

📸 More pictures

Parts of the atom. An atom is made of three main kinds of particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons have a positive charge and electrons a negative charge, while neutrons are electrically neutral. Protons and neutrons cluster in the nucleus, a tiny region near the center of the atom. Electrons whiz at great speed through the empty space outside the nucleus.

Comparing atoms by mass and size. Atoms vary greatly in mass, but they're all about the same size. The smallest and lightest atom of all is hydrogen, with one proton and one electron. The biggest and heaviest natural atom is plutonium, with 94 protons, 150 neutrons and 94 electrons. A plutonium atom weighs about as much as 200 hydrogen atoms, but its diameter is only about three times that of a hydrogen atom.

A fluorine atom has seven electrons in shell 2. It fills this shell by taking an electron from another atom.

🧩 Test yourself

1 What whizzes around an atom's nucleus?

2 What do two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom make together?

3 Which picture shows “Maize”?