Science Art: Hydrogen Density Plots, by PoorLeno



Click to embiggen

The way we grew up thinking about atoms – like teeny tiny solar systems with electrons orbiting a nucleus like planets around a sun – is wrong. They move in clouds or bundles of fuzz. They’re very, very fast, see? So fast, they might not really be things at all.

So this is a picture of the first few ways an electron will orbit around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, depending on just how much energy it’s got.

The picture’s by Wikimedia Commons user PoorLeno, but I found it through this cookie recipe. From a site dedicated to making cookies based on science imagery.