system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why don't electrons traveling in the orbitals of atoms lose energy, although they are a mass traveling a narrow space which should require some kind of acceleration to stay close to the atom?

As I learned in physics the acceleration of a mass (and the change of direction is an acceleration) results in a change of kinetic energy, so traveling in a narrow space like an electron around an atom requires acceleration to change the direction of the electron to stay around the atom, so then why are atoms stable at all and why don't electrons bounded to atoms lose energy all the time?

Edit: I meant acceleration of charge, not mass, thanks for pointig this out.
gpt
This is a good question, and one of the questions that led us away from the classical model of the atom and towards the quantum model. You are correct that the classical way we think of an atom (positively charged nucleus, negative particle in a circular orbit around it) would emit radiation, causing the electron to decay into the nucleus. The fact that this doesn't happen means this must not be the correct model.

We now know that the electron is not a point mass orbiting the nucleus at all, but a "density cloud" which constantly surrounds it. You've likely heard of the "wave particle duality" of light- well it's not just light which has this duality, all particles do (it's just most pronounced with light, since the less mass a particle has the more "wave like" it acts). So, the electron is in a wave around the nucleus (and actually, when it is in its ground state it is in a standing wave) so it doesn't radiate (in fact, when it is in an excited state it is no longer a standing wave, which is why it does radiate and then fall down to the ground state).