Scientists have discovered an atom filled with atoms. The atom's electrons orbit at such a great distance that there's room for other atoms.
The atoms within the "giant atom" form weak bonds, produ cing a new exotic state of matter -- what scientists have dubbed "Rydberg polarons."
The discovery combines a pair of atomic phenomenon, both of which can only be studied under extremely cold conditions: Bose-Einstein condensates and Rydberg atoms.
A Bose-Einstein condensate is a unique state of matter observed only at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Rydberg atoms are atoms featuring a single electron in a distant orbit and a highly excited state.
"The average distance between the electron and its nucleus can be as large as several hundred nanometers -- that is more than a thousand times the radius of a hydrogen atom," Joachim Burgdörfer, a professor at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, said in a news release.
Officials in Mauritius are planning to cull flying foxes, the large bat species native to...
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind...
It's been dubbed a comet, an asteroid, and a new class of interstellar object. Now, a...
An American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut were forced to eject from an aborted launch to the...
