Scientists study ‘alien ice,’ open door to engineering new materials
Stanford scientists created an ‘extraterrestrial orm of ice’ in hopes to better understand icy planets in the Universe and also engineer new materials.
In just a few nanoseconds, using the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world’s most powerful X-ray laser located at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the X-ray Free Electron Laser, scientists managed to capture the freezing of water, molecule-by-molecule, into a strange, dense form called ice VII (“ice seven”), found naturally in otherworldly environments.
According to the Stanford News Service, the science team beamed an intense, green-colored laser at a small target containing a sample of liquid water. The laser instantly vaporized layers of diamond on one side of the target, generating a rocket-like force that compressed the water to pressures exceeding 50,000 times that of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level.
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As the water compacted, a separate beam from an instrument called the X-ray Free Electron Laser arrived in a series of bright pulses only a femtosecond, or a quadrillionth of a second, long. Akin to camera flashes, this strobing X-ray laser snapped a set of images revealing the progression of molecular changes, flip book–style, while the pressurized water crystallized into ice VII. The phase change took just 6 billionths of a second, or nanoseconds. Surprisingly, during this process, the water molecules bonded into rod shapes, and not spheres as theory predicted.
The platform developed for this study – combining high pressure with snapshot images – could help researchers probe the myriad ways water freezes, depending on pressure and temperature. Under the conditions on our planet’s surface, water crystallizes in only one way, dubbed ice Ih (“ice one-H”) or simply “hexagonal ice,” whether in glaciers or ice cube trays in the freezer.
Delving into extraterrestrial ice types, including ice VII, will help scientists model such remote environments as comet impacts, the internal structures of potentially life-supporting, water-filled moons like Jupiter’s Europa, and the dynamics of jumbo, rocky, oceanic exoplanets called super-Earths.
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