What Are Subatomic Particles?

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Remy Dou I'm a science teacher here at Miami Christian School in Miami, Florida. Let's talk a little bit about subatomic particles. All matter, everything that you see, everything that you can touch, is made up of small particles called atoms. And atoms are very, very small. To give you an idea of how small an atom is, if I were to take a pencil and just put a little dot on a paper I can fit seven trillion carbon atoms on that dot in a single layer. They're extremely small. But these tiny particles called atoms have even smaller particles called subatomic particles. And there's three major subatomic particles. There's a proton which has a positive charge. There's a neutron which has no charge whatsoever and there are the electrons which have negative charges. Protons and neutrons are usually found together in the nucleus or the center of the atom. Kind of like the solar system. The sun would represent the nucleus. And so around the nucleus are the electrons which travel in different shapes, sometimes spherical, sometimes in figure eights and these electrons are traveling at almost the speed of light. Not quite the speed of light but almost the speed of light. And this is what makes up one atom. Atoms may vary in their number of neutrons or their number of protons. Even in their number of electrons. Chemical reactions take place because atoms exchange electrons. Radiation occurs because atoms lose protons. And so the activity of the subatomic particles gives matter it's properties. Believe it or not protons themselves, and neutrons, are composed of even smaller particles called quarks and gluons. Electrons are believed to be individual. There are no smaller particle in an electron."