It’s both solid and liquid, due to hydrogen atoms that can’t stay put. What do we know about lab-created alien ice.
The recipe for “super ionic ice”? It’s hard to know if it’s easier said than done: you have to insert a drop of water into a diamond socket, bring it to pressure and then cook it…with a laser.
It’s hard to see who would go to the trouble of making super ionic ice. But a new study by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Chicago puts us in front of the secrets of the universe: that some researchers have been able to recreate in the laboratory, right here on Earth.
What is super ionic ice and how is it made
The super ionic ice could closely resemble the ice present in the depths of some planets. It is, in short, an alien ice, a space ice, recreated on Earth, in the laboratories of the institutions that promoted the study.
What makes this alien material even more fascinating is the possibility of classifying it both as a material in the solid state, and as a material in the liquid state. Precisely, it is composed of a few water molecules arranged as in a lattice of oxygen atoms surrounded by restless hydrogens, which are constantly moving. The super ionic ice is therefore theoretically ice (solid state of water) but in fact both liquid and solid.
Why it is important to have recreated the “alien” material on Earth
Naturally now we also look at possible applications of the alien ice on Earth, provided that it already allows us to draw some conclusions about how planets other than ours could be made.
“It was a surprise: everyone thought this phase wouldn’t appear until you were at much higher pressures than where we first found it,” said Vitali Prakapenka, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago.
“But we have been able to map very accurately the properties of this new ice – he continued – which constitutes a new phase of matter, thanks to several powerful instruments.”
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Giuseppe Giordano