13 May 2019

"Hot ice" explained

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...

While normally unachievable on Earth, such conditions should be present deep inside the watery giants Uranus and Neptune, potentially helping to explain how these distant planets work, including the origins of their unusual magnetic fields...

In their latest tests, the researchers used six giant laser beams to generate a sequence of shockwaves that crunched a thin layer of liquid water into solidified ice at millions of times Earth’s surface pressure and between 3,000 and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Precisely timed x-ray flashes probed the configuration, which again only lasted for a few billionths of a second, and revealed that the oxygen atoms had indeed taken on a crystalline form...
Enough for me.  You can read more at National Geographic

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