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Title: Scientists Create a New Form of Ice At 2,357 Degrees Celsius
Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/2...
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 �" 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.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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