What do you get when you take laser-cooled Ytterbium, a fancy high powered lens and a butt load of time and effort? That is something Australian researchers were wondering too. The end result? A single Ytterbium atom cast a shadow of itself, a first for science.
It may sound silly at first to make a big deal out of it, but the truth is that up until the image was taken, it was not known if atoms could even cast a shadow. Atoms were, for the longest time, considered the smallest thing in the universe. Of course we know that’s no longer true, but they do set a boundary of sorts, hence why anything smaller is called “sub atomic.”
