Scientists Create a New Form of Ice At 2,357 Degrees Celsius (sciencealert.com) 28
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet -- under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). [...] In their new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme conditions expected in the interiors of ice giant planets.
They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level â" the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals. Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.
What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins. [Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.] The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.
They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level â" the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals. Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.
What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins. [Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.] The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.
And then... (Score:5, Funny)
...there was a sound like that of a gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes—and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue white pearl.
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Kurt was one of the greatest.
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WYWH is a very, very recent album. Unless you've seen them on the final lunacy set with me, you got no bragging rights.
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âoeâ¦deep inside Uranus⦠(Score:3)
I will never not be s 12 years old boy when it comes to Uranus.
Of no use to me... (Score:2)
...without a superheated, superionic single barrel bourbon.
It worked! (Score:3)
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Explains the "hot hail" as used by Ming the Merciless.
Re: It worked! (Score:2)
Re: It worked! (Score:2)
âoeThis? This is Slashdot. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.â
Superionic (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I can gather, superionic means the O2 is frozen in a lattice while the H2 moves around within in. Doesn't this just mean the water/ice has dissociated into solid oxygen with hydrogen diffused inside?
Re:Superionic (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite. It's not the hydrogen that moves around as H2, but rather the hydrogen ions H+, which is basically protons. It's basically analogous to metals, where the metal ion is frozen, in a sea of electrons, where the electrons can move about from atom to atom...thereby making the metal conductive to electricity. In the case of this water-ice, it would mean that oxygen ions are frozen in place in a sea of protons...and the protons are super-mobile.
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Yup. A better article about it:
https://www.quantamagazine.org... [quantamagazine.org]
So that's what IcyHot is made of (Score:2)
But is it any use? (Score:2)
I was going to ask whether this sort of research is worth funding, and then read the post about protons being a super mobile sea in which the Oxygen is a stable lattice. That's just the sort of crazy discovery that leads to breakthrough in the long term.
Now all we've got to do is explain the hexagon and decagon on Saturn. Over exposure to '2001' at a young age makes it hard to avoid jumping to a certain conclusion...