Atoms can be more overweight than we thought, a team of scientists in the United States has discovered. They have sent atoms crashing into one another in a particle accelerator to create bloated ...

Part of Physics (Single Science) Unit 1: Atomic and nuclear physics Protons and neutrons are the heaviest particles in an atom and as a result they make up most of its mass. The mass of electrons is ...

Physicists in Japan have blasted out the heaviest calcium nuclei ever seen—each containing the 20 protons needed to make the element, but with a huge number—40—of neutrons. That's twice as many ...

Fundamental physics, as we’ve seen, finds itself in a difficult situation. Nothing unexpected has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider. We have phenomena like dark matter and dark energy that are ...

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 ...