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If a body has more or fewer electrons than are required to balance the positive charge of the nuclei, then that object has a net electric charge. When there is an excess of electrons, the object is said to be negatively charged. When there are fewer electrons than the number of protons in nuclei, the object is said to be positively charged ...
Protons have a positive electric charge and neutrons have no charge, so the nucleus is positively charged. The electrons are negatively charged, and this opposing charge is what binds them to the nucleus. If the numbers of protons and electrons are equal, as they normally are, then the atom is electrically neutral as a whole.
The net charge of an ion is not zero because its total number of electrons is unequal to its total number of protons. A cation is a positively charged ion with fewer electrons than protons [2] (e.g. K + (potassium ion)) while an anion is a negatively charged ion with more electrons than protons. [3] (e.g. Cl-(chloride ion) and OH-(hydroxide ion)).
Electric charge is a conserved property: the net charge of an isolated system, the quantity of positive charge minus the amount of negative charge, cannot change. Electric charge is carried by subatomic particles. In ordinary matter, negative charge is carried by electrons, and positive charge is carried by the protons in the nuclei of atoms ...
Ionization (or ionisation specifically in Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) is the process by which an atom or a molecule acquires a negative or positive charge by gaining or losing electrons, often in conjunction with other chemical changes. The resulting electrically charged atom or molecule is called an ion.
Scientists eventually discovered that atoms have a positively charged nucleus (with an atomic number of charges) in the center, with a radius of about 1.2 × 10 −15 meters × [atomic mass number] 1 ⁄ 3. Electrons were found to be even smaller.
The collective action of the positively charged nucleus is to hold the electrically negative charged electrons in their orbits about the nucleus. The collection of negatively charged electrons orbiting the nucleus display an affinity for certain configurations and numbers of electrons that make their orbits stable.
Atoms that lose electrons make positively charged ions (called cations). This transfer of electrons is known as electrovalence in contrast to covalence . In the simplest case, the cation is a metal atom and the anion is a nonmetal atom, but these ions can be more complex, e.g. molecular ions like NH +