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- For a high school chemistry learner, the most correct explanation of the atom is called Charged Cloud Model or the Quantum Mechanical Model.
- Based principles:
- Don't know "Exactly" where the electron is located but just know the highest probability to find the electron. It is a region of space outside the nucleus. Electrons can be anywhere and move in any direction but most often are in that defined region. Therefore, we say that is "where the electron is".
- To paraphrase Bohr, you need to cut the region outside the nucleus into sub regions (he called them energy level). But Bohr did not cut enough, we now know you need to cut Bohr's energy levels into even smaller regions (thereby having more regions than 7).
- For all atoms, there will be the same specific line up of regions outside the nucleus where the electrons will be "located" starting from the region closet to the nucleus (electrons with the lowest amount of energy will be locate here) thru the region farthest away from nucleus (electrons with the highest energy will be located here). We call this listing of regions (with electrons included) the Electron configuration of the atom.
- Why do they call it a Charged Cloud Model.
- The only particle in the region of space outside the nucleus are electrons that are negatively charged particles.
- Electrons are constantly moving at approximately the speed of light (3.00E8m/s). The diameter of an atoms is about 1nm wide (closer to 10 nm but for this calculation 1nm is easier). So, if the electron is moving back and forth on the diameter of the atom (that is not actually how it moves), the electron will move across 1.00E17nm/s or approximately 1 billion billion times across the diameter of the atom in a second. So when you "see" the atom (we can't actually see it because it is so small), it would look like a "cloud" or haze.