In the quantum world, molecules are always on the move. And for the first time ever, scientists have directly captured these tiny quantum dances in action—and they did so by blowing them up real good.

Even at absolute zero, individual particles constantly vibrate without a fixed position, a phenomenon referred to as zero-point motion. In a paper published August 7 in Science , researchers at European XFEL harnessed this behavior for the 2-iodopyridine molecule, which consists of 11 atoms. By blasting the molecule with powerful, short bursts of X-ray pulses, the team created a “microscopic big bang” that allowed them to track, reconstruct, and therefore visualize the molecule’s quantum fluctuations.

“We were able to see that the atoms don’t just vibrate individually, but that they v

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