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Where is the electron? Look for it again and again, and a shape appears.
Atomic Orbitals lab · Last updated: 16 October 2026
You look for an electron inside an atom, again and again, marking each place it turns up. At first the dots look random, but slowly a shape appears.
What you'll discover
- You cannot know exactly where an electron is and how it is moving at the same time.
- Each look finds the electron in a different place, but some places turn up far more often than others.
- Many looks together build a cloud-like shape, an orbital, showing where the electron is most likely to be.
The science in plain words
In the simple model taught in school, electrons travel round the nucleus in fixed circular paths called shells, a little like planets round the Sun. This idea, from Niels Bohr in 1913, explains a lot, including why atoms give out light of particular colours. But experiments showed that electrons do not follow neat paths.
Electrons behave partly like waves. Quantum mechanics, developed in the 1920s, says we cannot know an electron's exact position and exact motion at the same time. Instead, we can only work out the probability of finding it in each place. If you could locate an electron many times and mark each spot, the marks would build up into a fuzzy cloud. Where the cloud is densest, the electron is found most often. These probability clouds are called orbitals.
Orbitals come in different shapes. The simplest, called s orbitals, are spheres around the nucleus. The next kind, p orbitals, look like two lobes on either side of the nucleus, like a dumbbell, and there are three of them pointing in different directions. More complicated d and f orbitals appear in heavier atoms. Each orbital can hold at most two electrons. The shapes of orbitals decide how atoms join together, so they explain the shapes of molecules and much of chemistry.
Where it fits
- India, NCERT: Class 9 science, Chapter 4: Structure of the Atom
- India, NCERT: Orbitals go beyond the NCERT syllabus for classes 6 to 10; the lab builds on the Bohr model in Class 9 Structure of the Atom.
- United States: Grades 9 to 12
- Next Generation Science Standards: HS-PS1-1
Common questions
What is an atomic orbital?
An orbital is a region around an atom's nucleus where an electron is likely to be found. It is not a path the electron follows. It is better pictured as a cloud, densest where the electron turns up most often. Each orbital holds up to two electrons.
What is the difference between an orbit and an orbital?
An orbit is a fixed path, like a planet round the Sun, used in the older Bohr model of the atom. An orbital is a three-dimensional region of probability where an electron is likely to be. Modern chemistry uses orbitals because electrons do not follow exact paths.
Why can we not know exactly where an electron is?
Electrons behave like waves as well as particles. Quantum physics shows that the more precisely you know an electron's position, the less precisely you can know its motion, and the other way round. So we describe electrons by the probability of finding them in each place.
Related labs
- Molecular Bonding: What holds two atoms together, and how hard do you have to shake them to break it?
- Radioactive Decay: Unstable atoms break down at random. How can we still say when half of them will be gone?
- Rainbow and Beyond: Slide from ultraviolet through the rainbow to infrared. Which light makes the star glow?
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Try it yourself
The Atomic Orbitals lab is one of the interactive 3D science labs inside Taz. Change one thing, predict what will happen, then run it and watch. Labs open after you sign in.