Bizarre Form of Hot Ice Seen
May 8, 2019
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/05/bizarre-hot-ice-xviii-seen-on-earth-superionic-uranus-neptune/
(Snip) the intro...
Now, researchers have snapped x-ray images of what might be the newest entrant to ice’s diversity: a highly electrically conductive material known as superionic ice. As the team reports today in the journal Nature, this ice exists at pressures between one and four million times that at sea level and temperatures half as hot as the surface of the sun.
“Yes, we’re talking about ice,” says study leader Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “But the sample is at several thousand degrees.”
(snip)
Superionic materials are dual beasts, part solid and part liquid, that on a microscopic level consist of a crystal lattice permeated by free floating atomic nuclei that can carry electrical charge. In water—aka H2O—the oxygen atoms would crunch into a solidified crystal while the hydrogen’s protons would zip around like a liquid. (Recently, another team of scientists working with potassium confirmed the existence of a state of matter that is solid and liquid at the same time.)
“It’s quite an exotic state of matter,” says coauthor Federica Coppari, also of the Livermore lab...
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Fascinating photo of this mysterious form of the stuff we call water. We have yet to learn all of its secret forms and properties, I guess.
A Song of Fire and Ice, indeed, George R.R. Martin.Hope this meets posting standards, LOL - it's my first.
= new reply since forum marked as read
