6 ms·
New kind of metal in the deep Earth
- ryandvm 15y agoHeavy.
- JonnieCache 15y agoTo save you reaching for gunits or doing any upsetting mental arithmetic, 4000°F == 2204°C, and 3000°F == 1649°C.
- jberryman 15y agoSo... really hot.
- noonespecial 15y agoSounds like the kind of thing that would sent Tesla running back to his lab the moment he learned of it.
- nvk 15y agoDisappointed, thought we would be expanding the Periodic Table.
- steventruong 15y agoIt already got expanded a couple times this year.
- guelo 15y agoThe periodic table is pretty much complete at this point, the super-heavy elements after about 112 are very unstable and are probably very rare in nature.
- mikeknoop 15y agoIsland of stability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
- Confusion 15y agoThere are however even heavier elements that are hypothesised to be stable. In that sense, the periodic table is not complete. probably very rare in nature. I don't know the scope you had in mind, but this seems to suggest these elements may occur naturally on earth. Just to be on the safe side, I want to point out that they don't. They just don't occur at all on earth, outside of laboratories for near infinitesimal amounts of time. The probability of them occurring naturally in cosmic-scale events is also extremely small. For all practical purposes, probably for at least a thousand year to come, these elements do not exist naturally.
- sliverstorm 15y agoEh, while the periodic table is not complete, Element UUUU will not be nearly as exciting as new properties for existing compounds.
- guelo 15y agoAny condition you can create in a lab probably exists somewhere in the universe. There's probably a planet of molten Californium somewhere out there being bombarded by Einsteinium asteroids.
- Confusion 15y agoThat's only true under the assumption of an infinite universe, in which even an event of the smallest probability will take place. Let's stick to the observable universe: it won't happen there.
- LearnYouALisp 15y agoAt 690,000 atmospheres, you can see this too!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- politician 15y agoBanish the thought, but for a moment, I thought of dwarves.
- Tloewald 15y agoI wonder how the pressures were achieved. I remember a sciam article way back which discussed attempts to create metallic hydrogen in the lab using, in essence, g-clamps. (Only a tiny amount of substance could fit into the apparatus, of course. Still it was amazing that such a simple device could achieve the necessary pressure.)
- tezza 15y agoOn a related note, I was astonished how many different states water (H20) can be in. Many more than just solid, liquid, gas. . See http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html My ice goes up to ice-eleven (XI) ?
- nsxwolf 15y agoDo the electrons really get squeezed closer to their nuclei? I thought that only happened in massive collapsing stars where gravity overpowers everything.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThere's a continuum. In the cores of stars that continuum bumps up against the physical limits of electron degenerate (white dwarf) matter. But even within ordinary planets like our own solid matter is compressed to a significant degree. For example, even though Earth's inner core is primarily comprised of Iron and Nickel it is compressed to such a degree that it is denser than Lead.
- samstave 15y agoDisclaimer: I have no clue what I am talking about What if gravity is an emergent result from the compression of matter? The greater the compression, the greater the density and gravity?
- chc 15y ago"The greater the compression, the greater the density" is essentially tautological. Of course packing the same amount of stuff in a smaller space makes it more dense. It's true in the same way the statement "Enlarging things makes them bigger" is true. But as for gravity, no. Gravity is a function of mass. Compressing a body into a smaller space will not increase the gravity you experience at a given distance from the mass's center of gravity (though it will allow you to get closer to the center of gravity). If you magically replaced the Sun with a black hole of equal mass, the planets would continue their orbits undisturbed — even though a black hole's singularity is infinitely dense and the Sun is less dense than the Earth on average.
- samstave 15y agoThanks for that reply!
- 15y ago
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThe truly fascinating part of this is how FeO is a conductor at these temperatures and pressures, but ceases to be so when the temperature or pressure drops. So for you computational physics students out there, consider the effects of a current in a moving current where the conductivity is determined by temperature and pressure. That is a simulation that has to take into account the thermodynamics of heat transfer out of the core, the temperature changing effects of constricting magnetic fields, and the effects of shock waves in a fluid in motion. Basically we don't have the science to describe the behavior of a planetary core made up of this type of material! Is that cool or what.
- rubidium 15y agoWe definitely have the science to describe this. It just happens to be very complicated. You're right in that it's a mixture of E&M, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. Whether it becomes computationally prohibitive to model is something I am unsure of, but may be possible with some simplifying assumptions. Edit: after a bit more research, I found a paper where, if I follow correctly, they are laying out a framework for creating such a model: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1611 http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1611
- troystribling 15y agoCompressible Magnetohydrodynamics is what you are looking for. A search will turn up lots of articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamics#Geophysics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamics#Geophysics
- ChuckMcM 15y agoSeriously? Except its not a plasma, its a fluid, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations don't include (at this stage) electromagnetic forces. Show me a paper that can describe a fluid in motion where the force on each element is computed as a function of the electromagnetic state, the thermal state, and the viscosity state of each other element and I'll show you a candidate for a Nobel prize. At least in the open literature I haven't seen CFD models that consider the influence of elements beyond a few centimeters, the magnetic forces in the Earth's core move elements meters, if not kilometers, away so the date sets do get very strange, and you have to mix in that if they cool to much or you hit an eddy current and the pressure drops the current gets cut off and the electrodynamic forces stop.
- jarin 15y agoKind of makes you wonder why Mars doesn't have a magnetic field then? Its composition is similar to Earth's, and I assume that it's big enough to have similar pressures and temperatures closer to the core?
- EwanG 15y agoMars is about half the size of Earth, so it's possible that is too small to make enough of this conversion happen to generate a magnetic field. Also some theories of Mars formation would lead to a different composition of its core due to prior collision(s).