Picture of an atom wins science contest........ But we really need to clear things up first as people will mistakenly believe that dot is the size of an atom: it's a long exposure picture, which means there's a lot of photons from the atom hitting the camera sensor which in turn activates the pixel that we're seeing as the purple dot. In reality a single atom is much much smaller. tl;dr: camera sensor pixel =! atom
Picture of an atom wins science contest........ But we really need to clear things up first as people will mistakenly believe that dot is the size of an atom: it's a long exposure picture, which means there's a lot of photons from the atom hitting the camera sensor which in turn activates the pixel that we're seeing as the purple dot. In reality a single atom is much much smaller. tl;dr: camera sensor pixel =! atom