I know they’re not exactly spheres (words like oblate and quadrupole come up) but they’re still pretty compact.
Protons repel each other electrostatically and nuclear forces (strong? weak?) attract protons and neutrons to each other.
But what is it about those nuclear forces that makes everything want to be a dense ball and not a chain or big loop?
In: 1
One proton is pretty spherical, there’s not really any other way to arrange it.
If you want to add a second proton, touching the surface of the first, because of strong force attraction (weak force breaks nuclie appart), then basically anywhere you put it you’ll have a line because the first proton is spherically symetrical. So proton 2 will be equally attracted to every point on proton 1.
When you want to add the third proton though, it’s going to be more attracted to where protons 1 and 2 touch. So now you have three points in a plane and proton 4 is going to be most attracted to sitting on top of those three like a pyramid.
Any new proton will find the place where all the forces on it balance, if a proton was somewhere with unbalanced forces it would accelerated towards a point where they were balanced.
This is also why planets are spherical, if it wasn’t a sphere gravity would pull it into one.
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