Question

If an atom had a radius of 100 m, it would be approximately the size of a football stadium. On this scale, what would the radius of the atomic nucleus be? The radius of the nucleus is approximately 10000 times smaller than the radius of an atom.

Answer 1

On a scale where an atom has a radius of 100 meters (the size of a football stadium), the radius of the atomic nucleus would be 0.01 meters or 1 centimeter, illustrating the vast difference in scale between the atom's size and its nuclei.

Step-by-step explanation:

If an atom were the size of a football stadium, with its radius being approximately 100 meters, then the radius of the atomic nucleus would be much smaller in comparison. Since the nucleus is about 10,000 times smaller than the atom, we calculate the radius of the nucleus on this scale as follows:

Rnucleus = Ratom / 10,000 = 100 m / 10,000 = 0.01 m.

This means that on the scale where an atom is as big as a football stadium, the nucleus would have a radius of just 1 centimeter, roughly the size of a pea or a blueberry. This succinctly illustrates how most of the atom's volume is empty space, with the dense nucleus occupying a minuscule fraction of the overall atomic volume.