Researchers Find New Form Of Ice: It Will Help Us Better Understand Exoplanets

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas researchers have discovered a new kind of ice after putting water through various kinds of pressures.

UNLV

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Reported first by Phys.org, researchers who were a part of UNLV¡¯s Nevada Extreme Conditions Lab developed a new method for measuring the properties of water under high pressure. The water was first squeezed between the tips of two opposite-facing diamonds, which froze the water into several jumbled crystals.

The ice was then put through a laser heating technique, that briefly melted it before it soon re-formed into a powder of tiny crystals.

By repeating the same process with an incremental rise in pressure and periodic blasts of laser beams, the team observed the water ice transition from a cubic phase to the newly discovered intermediate and tetragonal phase Ice-VIIt and later setting into another phase dubbed Ice-X.

This occurred as the squeezing of the water samples between diamonds caused the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the water in a variety of arrangements including the newly discovered IceVIIt arrangement.

Unsplash

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Zach Grande, a UNLV PhD student who led the research, also showed that water¡¯s transition to Ice-X occurs at a much lower pressure than previously thought -- at 300,000 atmospheres instead of 1 million -- a highly debated topic in the community for several decades now.

It isn¡¯t likely that we¡¯ll see such temperatures on Earth¡¯s surface, however, it could likely be a common ingredient in the Earth¡¯s mantle as well as in large moons and water-rich planets outside of our solar system.

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