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Posted on 03/10/2012 10:36:13 PM PST by U-238
Squeezing hydrogen at extreme pressures changes it into a mix of honeycombed atoms layered with free-floating molecules — an entirely new state of the element and the first new phase found in decades.
If confirmed, the discovery will be only the fourth known phase of hydrogen, the simplest element and one long probed for basic insights into the nature of matter.
“I think we have pretty bulletproof evidence that there is a new phase,” says Eugene Gregoryanz of the University of Edinburgh, leader of the team that will report the work in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.
Hydrogen’s first three phases pop into existence depending on the pressure and temperature. Gregoryanz and his colleagues squished room-temperature hydrogen to some of the highest pressures ever. At around 2 million times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere, the scientists saw distinct changes in certain properties, such as how light scatters into different wavelengths when shined through the hydrogen.
The change is dramatic enough to reflect some underlying fundamental shift, Gregoryanz says, representing the long-sought “phase IV” of hydrogen.
Analysis of the scattered light suggests phase IV contains both atoms and molecules of the element. Chris Pickard, a theoretician at University College London, says the hydrogen is probably arranged in hexagonal sheets of atoms separated by unbound molecules. In a 2007 paper, Pickard and a colleague calculated that such a structure might exist for hydrogen at these pressures. The Edinburgh experiments are “exciting certainly for me,” Pickard says, since they confirm his prediction.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
There is so much about this universe that we don’t understand.
I agree.
All your hydrogen are belong to us
It’ll be interesting to see if there are any uses for the new form of hydrogen.
What else is interesting is that chemists think the periodic table could be extended by at least another row and the element beneath element 111 may be a super stable element like gold.
They’ll keep messing around till someone loses an eye... Lots to discover though.
Looks like this could be useful in astronomy. Hydrogen may exist inside stars in this form.
It may also lead to finding the location of the mythical space bee.
Excellent point.
Hydrogen 1.1 (or would that be 1.00791)?
Getting hydrogen to do this trick without fusion... let’s say I don’t want to be close to the apparatus until they’ve proven they can do this without a hitch a few dozen times.
bflr
This long-sought new phase of Hydrogen sure sounds a lot like a Bose-Einstein condensate.
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Re: “Hydrogen may exist inside stars in this form.”
Many theorists also believe that the cores of Saturn and Jupiter are metallic hydrogen.
James Clerke Maxwell is responsible for our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum, only because some self-educated character named Heavyside changed four of Maxwell's 200 field equations into vector equations based on Heavyside’s notion that field equations were impossible ...
Which will be extremely useful when we start mining stars.
Or producing “”Metastable Metallic Hydrogen”.
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