• Question: how big is a nanometre

    Asked by connornjack to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 19 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Seyyed Shah

      Seyyed Shah answered on 19 Jun 2012:

      It is 1 billionth of a metre. If you divide a metre into 1000000000 equal parts, one of those parts is a nanometer.

      Something that is a few nanometers in length can only be seen by magnifying the object more than 100,000 times its normal size. This can be done using an electron microscope (like a normal light microscope which you might have used, but uses a beam of electrons and magnetic lenses).

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 19 Jun 2012:

      Seyyed is correct

    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      Yes, Seyyed has that one right. The maximum resolution of a normal microscope that uses light is 0.2 micrometeres, which is 200 nanometres. That means that, if two spots are less than 200 nanometres apart, they’ll look like just one spot down a light microscope.

      I did put links to a couple of scanning electron microscope images of the nuclei of cells on my profile, but I’m not sure if they’re working. I hope so, because they are just beautiful!

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