How do Scientists study small objects like molecules and atoms?
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Too many ways for a single answer. Here’s one way:
Usually we’re interested in how molecules or atoms react with other chemicals, and that’s usually determined by what the outer shell of electrons is doing.
We can learn about what’s going on with the electron shell of a molecule with a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance.
When you put a sample of something into a very strong magnetic field, and manipulate that field in a specific way, some nuclei behave like tiny bar magnets and generate a signal that can be measured.
Electrons flying around generate their own tiny magnetic fields and interfere with the signal, so what you actually measure is a slightly different signal for every nucleus in the sample that has a different environment around it.
You can put all those different signals together like a puzzle into a structure of the molecule in three dimensions. For really big molecules like proteins, you can even see signals between nuclei that aren’t directly bound to each other but are held close together by secondary structure.
Edit: You can get different types of information from different NMR experiments, which you can then combine into structural details. The most common experiments look at hydrogen nuclei, carbon-13 nuclei or nitrogen-15 nuclei, which are in almost all organic molecules.
You can learn what the proportions of each kind of nucleus are, which nuclei are directly bound to each other, which ones are held in specific angular rotations to each other, and which ones are close to each other in space.
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