h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

that would be sweat too...think about how much smaller the "orbitals" would be b/c of the higher mass!

So you could have a nucleus of anti-protons, surrounded by protons. That would be nuts.

It *is* different though isn't it as electrons and posistrons are both leptons and (as far as we know) fundamental particles.
Protons and their counterparts are baryons made from three quarks and so a proton...antiproton pair might well just react to form a different species...

I thought electrons are made up of quarks too?

As far as I know electrons are considered indivisable at the moment, although there are negatively charged quarks. One clue is that an electron is around the same mazz as a proton.

Why would an electron and positron not annihilate though? Reading what was said about positronium, my imediate and I suppose not particularly thought through assumption was that the energy step prevented them from coming into actual 'contact', whatever that means on such scales and with apparantly point particles. Thus I would have guessed that your 2-positronium would be fundamentally unstable due to the chaotic nature of the particles orbits.

As an aside, would three bodies or more attracting each other through inverse square relationships like gravity or electromagnitism be considered to be true orbits, or is that only possible when there are (or approximate to as far as is necessary, as in the case of Earth & Moon orbiting Sun) two bodies orbitting the common centre of mass?

Oh, and mazz=mass.

Electron mass = 1/1000 the proton mass...?

Regarding positronium, according to that Phys Rev Lett, they do annihilate. They study the positronium via the gamma rays that are emiitted when they annihilate!


Good point about the 3 bodies. I don't think even in classical mechanics, a 3-body system as ever been solved analytically. I don't think that necessarily means they're aren't stable orbits. The equivlanet in quantum mechanics, stable wavefunctions, should also be true, given the right conditions. But what those shapes would actually be...I have no idea, and wouldn't want to guess.

A666173

Hmm...

So: 1-Positronium is unstable anyway (tbh I thought it probably was!).

As an aside, should we rename an electron a negatron?

without checking Orcus' link, is a Neutron a Proton+an electron or is a Proton a Neutron + a positron? And could you therefore have a Negtron being a Neutron + an electron?