How Atoms Work

October 18, 2017November 23, 2022 / Emma / Leave a comment

Have you ever seen something like this?

I’m going to venture a wild guess and say you haven’t, since scientists have only recently been able to take this kind of image. I learned about it in my biology class this semester, and the professor said that it was a landmark achievement.

You’re looking at an atom.

Yes, that’s right. You’re looking at a single, microscopic building block of matter.

Let me give you an idea of just how small this is. Millions of the smallest atom in the universe can fit lined across the diameter of a single pinhead.

But I’ll ask you another question. If I showed you an image like the one below, would you immediately think, “atom”?

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The Building Blocks of the Universe

October 16, 2017November 23, 2022 / Emma / 8 Comments

“The Building Blocks of the Universe.” When you put it that way, atoms sound less like a topic specifically for a chemistry class and more like something astronomers might discuss.

They really are. I’ve got a fantastic reason to include atoms under astronomy, and its name is stellar spectra.

We’ve encountered stellar spectra before in these astronomy posts. When I wrote about the spectrograph, an instrument astronomers use to study data, I talked about spectral lines. I also promised we’d come back to elaborate on that later.

We’re not actually going to talk about the spectrograph in this post. I’m saving that for another time. For now, I’m going to cover atoms in a little more detail.

That way, we’ll have a better understanding of how they interact with light later on—and that will help us understand the spectrograph.

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