Thursday, May 17, 2007

Hot Ice World Found

Another strange world has been found in a distant solar system. This planet has water but in a very weird form:

"Water has more than a dozen solid states, only one of which is our
familiar ice," said study team member Frederic Pont of the University of Geneva
in Switzerland.


In the same way that carbon can transform into diamonds under
extreme pressures, water turns into other solid states denser than both liquid
and ice under very high pressures. Physicists call these alternative forms of
water Ice VII and Ice X.

I wonder if there are any industrial uses of these weird forms of water? Here is an artist rendering of this so called Hot Hoth:



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