ELI5, is it theoretically possible to have a particle is big enough to behave like a planet? I’m using planet as a device to act as the counter to the particle behavior because I don’t know them correct term.
Is there a mass or property that is the teetering point between acting like a planet vs a particle? If we find a particle with a massive mass, would it be possible that it might act like a planet.
I’m guessing I’m missing a key piece of understanding….
In: Physics
The closest think I can think of as a boundary would be a particle that exceeds the mass of the smallest possible black hole (because then it would be a black hole, not a particle) which is 2.2×10−8 kg.
That happens to be something like 10^29 times more mass than the heaviest particle we know to exist the Top quark. While there’s a potential for slightly heavier particles to exist that’s unlikely, and not really in the range of black hole mass.
If you are talking about the boundary in size between when things stop acting according to quantum mechanics laws and start looking more like classical physics we really don’t know. We know general scales which basically amount to very cold and very small, but quantum mechanics in its current form just does not have any known mechanism to turn it into classical mechanics, though there are some theories. It’s one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics.
So everything has wave like properties no matter how massive. It’s just those properties become effective zeros when scaled to sizes you and I can see. When we call the wave length of a particle zero is mostly just made up as any number is as good as the one next to it as the wavelength is set to a smooth scale. That said I think most qualify it as when it stops displaying wave behavior in the double slit experiment which is about 100 atoms large last I heard.
“Particle” doesn’t have a set size or anything, and you can treat basically anything you want as a particle.
In fact, if you were to model a galaxy you would basically just treat all of the stars as particles.
A particle is just something, *anything*, that can be described as having some physical properties that you want to model. I know that’s really vague, but that’s because it’s supposed to be.
So the answer to your question is basically “yes” because we can (and do) treat planets like particles.
Now, things like an atomic nucleus can be classified as a *composite particle*, as in the table at the bottom chart on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_nucleus
It’s all about the semantics.
If you really want to you could say that a [neutron star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star) is technically just a collection of many neutrons, held together by gravity, in a ball around 10 km across, at the density of atomic nuclei.
Latest Answers