system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What keeps the protons in the nucleus of a atom from repelling each other?

In chemistry, we were taught it has do do with the quarks and gluons, but didn't get much deeper than that. How exactly do these quarks and gluons peek the protons together?
gpt
Protons do cause a mutually repulsive Coulomb interaction between each other, but there is also an attractive force due to the residual strong force. The residual strong force dominates at small distances.

The strong force is what acts between quarks and gluons, and it's what causes nucleons (protons and neutrons) to form in the first place. When you have a bunch of nucleons (or general hadrons) in close proximity to each other, there is a residual strong force between them analogous to the Van der Waals forces between atoms and molecules. This is what causes nucleons to bind together to form nuclei.

If the nucleus gets large enough (high enough atomic number Z relative to the mass number A), Coulomb repulsion will start to overpower the strong force. This can cause the nucleus to become unstable to spontaneous fission when Z^(2)/A is greater than approximately 47, according to the liquid drop model.