Deep inside Neptune there is a layer of ice sitting at around five thousand degrees Celsius — hot enough to boil iron, and it still will not melt.
It is called superionic ice. Under millions of times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, water molecules are torn apart. The oxygen atoms lock into a rigid crystal lattice and stop moving, while the stripped hydrogen nuclei flow freely through the gaps between them. The same substance is frozen solid and flowing at the same time.
Predicted in 1988, it stayed a calculation on paper for thirty years. In 2019 a team led from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory finally made it, firing lasers into a droplet of water and compressing it in billionths of a second.
It may also explain something Voyager 2 found in 1989. Earth’s magnetic field is neat and centred. Neptune’s is tilted roughly forty-seven degrees from its rotation axis and pushed well off from the planet’s core. Flowing hydrogen nuclei carry electric charge, and moving charge makes magnetism — so Neptune may be wrapped in a magnetic field generated by ice that can never melt.
Did you know ice could exist at those temperatures? Tell me in the comments.
#superionicice #neptune #space #physics #science
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Yes
We can expect to discover much stranger properties of ice and gas.
So this is our "dome?" Created by our plasma belts from outside -in? 😊
Thanks.
So fantastic ❤❤wow ❤thank you❤❤
Yes,5 days ago I happened to watch a YT video where ice can be in 3 states at the same time,vapor,liquid and ice.
If this state of superionic ice exists it will never exist on planet Earth except very briefly during extreme experiments.
This matter of superionic ice in the core of Neptune is still basically a theory because we will never have instruments at Neptune that can prove this.
And who were the intrepid astronauts who went there and observed this?
Fascinating.
But gravitational field is different from magnetic field
So what will happen if you try to get rid of the pressure itself?
😂
No. I didn't know.
How can scientists know things in planets billions of miles away?
I forgot all I know about ice but wait, I hate I.C.E ☝🏼