Above the radiation zone is another thick shell called the convection zone, where the temperature is cool enough that bare atomic nuclei can capture orbital electrons and behave as a gas.
22.
Instead they produced a colorful glow discharge ( as in a modern neon light ), caused when the electrons or ions struck gas atoms, exciting their orbital electrons to higher energy levels.
23.
If the mass difference between the parent and daughter atoms is more than 1.022 MeV / c 2 ( two electron masses ), another decay is accessible, capture of one orbital electron and emission of one positron.
24.
A photon, generally in a lower energy range, can be absorbed by displacing an orbital electron, and then a new photon having the same energy is emitted in a random direction when the electron drops back down.
25.
A theory advanced by the German-led group is that the huge electric charge of the nucleus of an exceptionally heavy atom increases the spin rate of some of the atom's orbital electrons to near the speed of light.
26.
Since the electrons that orbit atoms are quantum particles, the mathematics of quantum mechanics apply to them, and physicists and chemists have long known that it is theoretically possible to predict the interactions of atoms by calculating the wave functions of their orbital electrons.
27.
The energy of an excited nucleus may be emitted as a gamma ray in a process called gamma decay, or that energy may be lost when the nucleus interacts with an orbital electron causing its ejection from the atom, in a process called internal conversion.
28.
The other polymorphs are polymeric, but in each case the phosphorus atoms are bound by a tetrahedron of oxygen atoms, one of which forms a terminal P = O bond involving the donation of the terminal oxygen p-orbital electrons to the antibonding phosphorus-oxygen single bonds.
29.
If the mass difference between parent and daughter is less than this, a proton-rich nucleus may still convert protons to neutrons by the process of electron capture, in which a proton simply electron captures one of the atom's K orbital electrons, emits a neutrino, and becomes a neutron.
30.
But we don't encounter free protons and free neutrons in " everyday life ", because their presence is an indication that there are some high energy nuclear processes happening-it takes much more energy to dislodge a nucleon from a nucleus than it does to free an orbital electron.
