Hydrogen Squeezed Into a Metal, Possibly Solid, Harvard Physicists Say

Squeezed between two pieces of diamond, hydrogen has been transformed into a metallic form believed to exist inside giant planets like Jupiter, scientists reported on Thursday.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Hydrogen Squeezed Into a Metal, Possibly Solid, Harvard Physicists Say

Squeezed between two pieces of diamond, hydrogen has been transformed into a metallic form believed to exist inside giant planets like Jupiter, scientists reported on Thursday.

More…

sarahs mum said:

Means absolutely nothing to me.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/diamond-vise-turns-hydrogen-metal-potentially-ending-80-year-quest

Means a lot to me. Metallic hydrogen is a major component of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.
If you go underneath the atmospheres of these two gas giants you find a surface of liquid metal hydrogen.
Another thing about liquid metal hydrogen. You know how white dwarfs are made from “degenerate matter”. Liquid metal hydrogen is an example of “degenerate matter” when it’s cooled sufficiently.

It’s very difficult to make because you require a lot of pressure.

Oh wait. This is solid metallic hydrogen. I hadn’t heard of that, I only know of liquid metallic hydrogen. Can you get solid metallic hydrogen inside giant planets?

We eagerly await final confirmation – or shattering of the diamond anvil cell, whichever comes first.

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Hydrogen Squeezed Into a Metal, Possibly Solid, Harvard Physicists Say

Squeezed between two pieces of diamond, hydrogen has been transformed into a metallic form believed to exist inside giant planets like Jupiter, scientists reported on Thursday.

More…

sarahs mum said:

Means absolutely nothing to me.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/diamond-vise-turns-hydrogen-metal-potentially-ending-80-year-quest

Means a lot to me. Metallic hydrogen is a major component of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.
If you go underneath the atmospheres of these two gas giants you find a surface of liquid metal hydrogen.
Another thing about liquid metal hydrogen. You know how white dwarfs are made from “degenerate matter”. Liquid metal hydrogen is an example of “degenerate matter” when it’s cooled sufficiently.

It’s very difficult to make because you require a lot of pressure.

Oh wait. This is solid metallic hydrogen. I hadn’t heard of that, I only know of liquid metallic hydrogen. Can you get solid metallic hydrogen inside giant planets?

We eagerly await final confirmation – or shattering of the diamond anvil cell, whichever comes first.

Would it be extremely dense ?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hydrogen-metal-revolution-technology-space-rockets-superconductor-harvard-university-a7548221.html

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Hydrogen Squeezed Into a Metal, Possibly Solid, Harvard Physicists Say

Squeezed between two pieces of diamond, hydrogen has been transformed into a metallic form believed to exist inside giant planets like Jupiter, scientists reported on Thursday.

More…

sarahs mum said:

Means absolutely nothing to me.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/diamond-vise-turns-hydrogen-metal-potentially-ending-80-year-quest

Means a lot to me. Metallic hydrogen is a major component of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.
If you go underneath the atmospheres of these two gas giants you find a surface of liquid metal hydrogen.
Another thing about liquid metal hydrogen. You know how white dwarfs are made from “degenerate matter”. Liquid metal hydrogen is an example of “degenerate matter” when it’s cooled sufficiently.

It’s very difficult to make because you require a lot of pressure.

Oh wait. This is solid metallic hydrogen. I hadn’t heard of that, I only know of liquid metallic hydrogen. Can you get solid metallic hydrogen inside giant planets?

We eagerly await final confirmation – or shattering of the diamond anvil cell, whichever comes first.

Would it be extremely dense ?

I’m not sure.

The density depends on the mass. Which doesn’t normally make sense, but does for metallic hydrogen. The greater the mass, the greater the density. This has nothing to do with gravity or pressure, it has to do with the way the Pauli Exclusion Principle works. A white dwarf star has a lot of mass so is extremely dense, this experiment only has a small amount of mass.

In normal atomic matters, the Pauli Exclusion Principle keeps the atoms apart. In metallic hydrogen, the electrons are not attached to the atomic nuclei any more, and so the Pauli repulsion between electron clouds no longer keeps the atomic nuclei apart. So what you get can be denser than, for example, platinum or osmium. The actual density depends on the electrostatic repulsion between the protons.

I don’t see any good pictures of this on the web. I did draw a picture of it myself a couple of years back.

As for a mass of metallic hydrogen this small, I don’t know how dense it would be. Let me check the web.

In 1996, when the first liquid metallic hydrogen was produced, it had a density of 0.6 g/cm^3. That’s a bit lighter than water.

For the present work, they give a density of solid metallic hydrogen of 6.7 * 10^23 atoms per cubic centimetre. Getting out the calculator, that’s close to 40 g/cm^3. Osmium is 22.6 g/cm^3 so this is more dense than normal matter, but only by a factor of 1.8.

Thanks

sarahs mum said:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hydrogen-metal-revolution-technology-space-rockets-superconductor-harvard-university-a7548221.html

> Harvard University have finally succeeded in creating a tiny amount of what is the rarest, and possibly most valuable, material on the planet, they reported in the journal Science.

Not rarest. Antimatter is rarer and more valuable.

> metallic hydrogen could theoretically revolutionise technology, enabling the creation of super-fast computers, high-speed levitating trains and ultra-efficient vehicles and dramatically improving almost anything involving electricity.

Errrr. Um, this hypothesis needs testing, and will be tested very soon. The hypothesis is based on the fact that metallic hydrogen ought to be a superconductor. On the other hand, anything that requires pressures of 495 GPa and temperatures of 5.5 K is not going to much use for any applications like this. The unknown is that, once formed, it may be metastable at higher temperatures and/or lower pressures – so the boundaries of any such metastability will have to be and will be probed quite soon.