Like in this picture[pic](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSCCadOhv2cxPQIYF5Uo6IOICOSAAIfFWboMg&usqp=CAU),
what is the thing at the top? Is it just space?
In: Physics
Not sure what that picture is supposed to be, but what do you mean by between atoms? If there is nothing there taking up space, it will have to be a vacuum, as far as I know.
The atom itself is said to consist mostly of empty space, which is basically just a way to explain that most of it´s mass is concentrated in the nucleus. Then there is this buzzing “cloud” of electrons around it. The distance between the nucleus and the outer electrons is absurdly large, relative to the size of the nucleus.
Have you got the source for the image? It’s hard to say without knowing exactly what this is.
It looks like it’s an image from an electron microscope. There is a very fine needle of atoms that moves across a surface. This needle detects how close or far something is, letting you draw a sort of contour map. I’d guess that the empty patch is just a region where the surface is too far away from the needle to.be detected.
This picture is from [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EogdalfXF4c) from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. There is an article describing it in detail [here](https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2009/03/26/atoms-in-action/). It is a video taken using an electron microscope, of a sheet of graphene (so a one-atom-thin layer of carbon atoms), as they punched a hole through it using a beam of electrons.
The rings taking up most of the image are the carbon atoms. The actual atoms are where the lines meet. [This is a colour, 3d render](https://newscenter.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2009/03/hole3d_1_sm.jpg) of the image, and [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graphen.jpg) is a render showing how the atoms (and bonds) in graphene are arranged.
The gap in the top middle is just that – a gap. There is nothing there. There *were* more carbon atoms there, but the electron beam has knocked them out of place.
The point of the video is to show how the remaining carbon atoms around the edge of the hole re-arrange themselves into the most stable arrangement they can find.
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