Atom is electrically neutral because in an atom electrons and protons carry charges and each atom has equal numbers of protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged). Atoms are electrically neutral because they have equal numbers of protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged). If an atom gains or loses one or more electrons, it becomes an ion. If it gains one or more electrons, it now carries a net negative charge, and is thus 'anionic.' The atom is electrically neutral, because it has an equal number of protons and electrons, but the electrons are all on one side of the atom, so a dipole (uneven distribution of charge) is created. It is temporary, because the electrons continue to move. Mar 31, 2020 When it contains fewer electrons than protons, the atom is called a cation, or positively charged ion. Conversely, when it contains more electrons than protons, the atom is called an anion, or negatively charged ion. The number of electrons that surround the nucleus determines whether or not an atom is electrically charged or neutral. .Atom is electrically neutral, because. 1️⃣ both the positively and negatively charged parts in the atom are balanced. 2️⃣ positively charged part in the atom is stable. 3️⃣ negatively charged part in the atom is varying. 4️⃣ Atom is microscopic right answer mark as branliest.
Answer 1:By definition, an atom is electrically neutral (i.e. has the same number of protons as it does electrons, plus some number of neutrons depending on the isotope). If a species were charged, it is referred to as an ion (cation for positively charged and anion for negatively charged species), also by definition.
But this is probably not a very satisfying answer. (I personally find answers based on definitions pretty bland.) Perhaps an interesting follow up question is...
Is the universe electrically neutral?
For many instances in science, we deal with systems where charge neutrality is very important.
Faraday Ice Pail
Perhaps a common example you might be familiar with is table salt, NaCl. Before forming salt, both sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) are electrically neutral atoms. Then chlorine nabs an electron from a sodium because it is more energetically favorable for it to have an additional electron. You then have a Na+ cation and Cl- anion that combine into NaCl due to electrostatic attraction. Overall, NaCl is a neutral system (table salt doesn't shock you when you eat it... hopefully).
This property of electrical neutrality is also very important in the work that I do every day. I do computational research on crystals like NaCl where we calculate energies of a variety of sorts to understand the material. Part of calculating the total energy of a system for a crystal like NaCl involves the energy contribution that arises from Coulombic forces between every combination of Na+ and Cl- anion. This would mean figuring this out for something like 1023 ions (which is a lot). We do something a little more clever. NaCl is a crystal, which means it has a periodic (i.e. repeating) structure, so we only need to consider a unit cell, or small portion that can reproduce the entire crystal structure by translating it. But this means what we model is infinitely large materials. This is okay for bulk materials, since surface effects are small.
What is more worrying are those long range Coulombic forces. If we're not careful, we could end up with infinite energy! And that would be no good. This can be solved with a clever way of adding Coulombic forces (called Ewald summation) and a charge neutral unit cell.
But if many everyday things we are familiar with are electrically neutral, does this mean that the universe has to be electrically neutral?
Maybe.
Electrically Neutral Definition
It's actually still an open research question. What do you think would happen if the universe were just slightly positively charged overall? This is different from being ionized- that just means there are positively and negatively charged particles. But do these particles have to just balance each out? You can follow an interesting discussion here or a pretty recent article about how the universe could be slightly positively charged (the math gets a little hairy towards the end, but there luckily is more exposition overall).
Hope this helps!
Best,