Physicists have known for decades that particles called gluons keep protons and neutrons intact—and thereby hold the universe together. Yet the details of how gluons function remain surprisingly ...

An atom is the smallest unit of an element that retains its chemical properties. It is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. (Image: M ...

If you expanded an atom to the size of a baseball, what would it look like? And how would the inside look if you sliced it open? The nucleus is the atom’s central core and contains more than 99.9 ...

Physics Professor Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez and his students are using the largest and most complex machine ever built to probe the strongest force in nature at the tiniest of scales. “In a ...

Figure 1: Electron flux as a function of longitude in different L shells for the period 4–14 January 2013. Figure 2: Dependence of an electron’s drift path on its altitude and L shell. Figure 3: ...

This video explores the fundamental components of an atom, including protons, neutrons, and electrons, challenging the traditional model that depicts electrons as orbiting the nucleus. It highlights ...

Inside the nucleus of some atoms, protons appear to be doing very unexpected things. They are pairing up far more often than usual when they get extremely close to each other, and physicists don’t ...

Particle detectors play a crucial role in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. They allow scientists to study the behavior and properties of the particles produced in ...

An element's atomic number defines it. An element with 17 protons will always be chlorine. However an element's mass numbers can vary, which means that it can have different numbers of neutrons. So ...

There are few things in the Universe that are as easy to form, in theory, as black holes are. Bring enough mass into a compact volume and it gets more and more difficult to gravitationally escape from ...