Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest
This is an insanely cool picture.<p>Some quick napkin math (please let me know if I'm way off base here): in the second pic, the electrodes are ~74 pixels apart and the strontium atom is ~2 pixels wide.<p>The electrodes are ~0.078 inches apart, so these 2 pixels represent ~0.0021 inches (or ~0.05334 mm).<p>Google tells me that the Van der Waals radius of a single strontium atom is 255 pm.<p>So the diameter of the actual atom is something like 10,000x smaller than the space represented by these pixels. Crazy!