As you assuredly already know, when water gets cold enough, it becomes a solid known as ice. At normal atmospheric pressure, which affects the temperatures at which water turns into ice, water begins to freeze at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The rest of the world uses zero degrees Celsius to mark the point at which water freezes.
When we think of ice, we think of cold, dripping ice cubes that is quite cold to the touch. Keeping in contact with ice for too long can result in frostbite.
Although it might not make much sense, scientists working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory formed a type of ice that was near as half as hot as the one and only Sun at the center of the Solar System.
Researchers had to seriously modify the experiment location’s atmospheric pressure. They significantly increased the pressure in the place of experimentation in order to get the ice to form at ultra-hot temperatures.
When water finds its way into outer space, it very, very quickly vaporizes despite the temperature of space being some negative 270 degrees Celsius. Researchers got the idea to seriously beef up the pressure in the experimentation chamber after thinking about how water vaporized as soon as it made its way into space despite there being virtually no pressure in outer space.
The scientists gave the name of Ice VII to their new, groundbreaking form of ice. They had to increase the atmospheric pressure of the test facility to more than 30,000 factors greater than that of the Earth’s regular atmospheric pressure. The researchers also plan on proceeding with similar experiments in the future, such as making another virtually unreal type of supersonic ice known as Ice XVIII.
In order to make the ice, the scientists first spread out a very thin layer of water between two anvils that were constructed entirely out of diamonds.
Immediately after it’s wedged between the heavy slates of diamond, a group of six ultra-powered lasers causes the pressure of the water to increase by a factor of anywhere between one and four million times greater than the standard atmospheric pressure of planet Earth.
The Sun, for comparison to the superhot ice, is some 5,505 degrees Celsius, whereas the tech that the researchers use to make hot ice manages to get the special form of solid water to come to reality anywhere between the temperatures of 1,650 and 2,760 degrees Celsius.
