Scientists report world’s first X-ray of a single atom in Nature
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I think they don't even collect the X-rays after they hit the atom.
IIUC they use x-rays of different energies to light an atom, and use a tunnel microscope probe to collect electricity. Each different energy of the x-ays produce a different amount of electricity in the tunnel microscope. They get an spectrum, like the one near the bottom of the article, that can be used to identify the atom, but not to take a "photo".
As a sibling comment says, this is an spectroscopy. You regulate some level of frequency/energy with the input (x-ray) and you get only one value (current in the tunnel tip). So you get a 1D array of values that is easy to see like a function. But each point does not correspond to a part of the space, it's some abstract value connected to the whole atom.
Oversimplifying, look at the image at the bottom. When people read "x-ray" they expect something like the left panel, but their result was the right panel.
Note that spectroscopy is very useful. There are like 5 or 10 methods and each one is related to a different property of the atom/molecule. So a new one is always welcome, but it may take a while to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of his one. The problem is the whole story about x-rays. They are using x-rays, but the method and result is very different from the x-ray images people know.
They are not using a single atom. They have millions of millions of millions of atoms. Each atom is trapped with an organic molecule (there is an image near the bottom of the article). All the organic molecules are connected to a flat surface.
They move down the tip of the tunnel microscope slowly until it's near the surface, and then they move it to the sides until the tip is near the one of the atoms they want to analyze. (It's probably slightly more complicated.)
They use the x-ray to illuminate all the surface. The x-ray allow more/less tunneling, so the current in the tip changes.
So they have millions of millions of millions of atoms, but the tip is only near one of them. They are only measuring that atom. All the other atoms are just ignored, because tunneling is a very short range effect.
But then you recall that everything is actually invisible to humans at these scales, and we are trying to create representations of the truth that will always be just a grasp out of our hands, especially when we want to simplify it to a level of abstraction that our minds can comprehend.
The answer of course is "nothing".
Technically there is more of nothing in the universe even around thing that seem like a great deal of something.
So not just the universe but everything, is mostly nothing with just very small bits of something.
Don't think about it too much, lol
The problem isn't the "nothing". The problem is your preconceived notions were wrong. They were always wrong. They didn't become wrong when this was discovered. The risk of you falling through the floor because you're supported by so much "nothing" does not change one tiny little bit when you learn how the world really works.
Your worth as a human being, or an object, or whatever, was never rooted in you being a solid object in accordance with your preconceived notions. The anchor of value is that whatever you really are, you are valuable. When you find out that you weren't what you thought you were, your value does not change. You change the value you place on the new things you discovered, rather than the other way around.
I read news articles about the origin of consciousness or how empty atoms are or whether the universe is a simulation with peace, because whatever I am, I am. My understanding of what I am is not who or what I am. It has been wrong many times before and the only sensible extrapolation of the world around me is that I am wrong in many more ways. My understanding can change, but I am what I am.
That is not to say there is nothing that would ever shake me, but this does push the frontier much farther out, certainly well beyond merely discovering that atoms are "mostly empty space".
(Which in its own way turns out to be wrong itself, or at the very least debatable. The idea that it's "mostly empty space" in my opinion quite nontrivially derives its cultural staying power precisely from the shock value you're experiencing, but not the actual truth of the situation. There's another perfectly sensible point of view that says the electrons are effectively solid in all the ways you care about, and pictures like [1] are really quite accurate and atoms really are fairly large. The "empty space" model comes from the idea that the electron is a point particle localized in one location, but that's a pre-quantum mechanics view of the world. From this perspective, yes, the floor beneath you is quite solid and not really "empty space".)
(Then you dig further, into field theory, and it turns out that even "empty space" is itself quite busy... in a weird sort of way if I'm "freaked out" it's almost about the exact opposite of "the universe is so big and empty"; the universe of the Standard Model is absolute utter chaos and we're sitting up here at a level where in roughly the time of the smallest perceivable interval (call it 50ms for convenience), the universe has gone through 10^42 "ticks", that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 "ticks". It staggers the mind how much the universe is doing all the dang time and how it all averages out and cancels into the visible universe as we experience it. Everyone knows that when you look "up", out into the stars and galaxies and clusters and superclusters and filaments that the universe is really big, but it is quite big "down" too!)
[1]: https://www.monospektra.com/wp-content/uploads/pi1125_Bild1-...
The world crumbles in the pursuit of trying to understand why you only flip heads. Theories are invented, and prizes awarded, but nobody knows that it’s just because that version was extremely specific in its randomness.
In a world where there are infinite possibilities and infinite attempts, all possibilities are an eventuality, including floating brains in space.
This is a thought I had while doing the dishes today.
But I also love that optimism. And there are versions who gave up LONG before where you are! This might be the version where you win!
There's an absolutely hilarious episode of "Space: 1999" about this.