this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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They say it's a picture of atoms, but what are the atoms: the glowing yellow balls or the entire meatball including the darker red? If it's the meatballs, then why do some have apparently two nuclei?

Here's the public press release: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/05/cornell-researchers-see-atoms-record-resolution

Here's the actual scientific article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2533

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Atoms are almost entirely empty space. And electrons themselves don't really occupy a specific dot in space, they're more of a blur that fuzzes out in a "large" region of space around the nucleus. So what's shown here is most likely a visualization of the area that the electrons occupy.

But I'm no physicist and i didn't read the article, so take this with a big grain of salt

EDIT

Another person here said the round things are actually the nuclei, and they sound like they know what they're talking about. So while the informational stuff i said is right, it might not actually be a description of the image we're looking at