Bizarre Form of Water Ice Solves a Magnetic Mystery on Neptune and Uranus

I wanted to start with this beautiful time lapse of the formation of a typical snowflake basically a crystalline form of water representing a beautiful geometric shape as a result of molecules of water assuming certain patterns but the main reason I wanted to start with this is essentially because this is something we are aware of most of us are familiar with snowflakes and obviously most of us are familiar with water ice the crystallized form of liquid water that's extremely on Earth but this also creates a bit of a bias for us as human beings because we kind of start making assumptions that this is exactly what we're going to discover outside of planet Earth and this is the type of water we're going to be finding on a lot of different objects such as asteroids or around various other planets out there and well here's the thing though water on planet Earth and even ice on planet Earth are believed to be extremely rare and to some extent extremely unique so not only does the isotopic composition of water on Earth seems to be somewhat different from a lot of other objects even the ice itself is different as well both in structure properties and appearance once again to some extent making planet Earth may be just a little bit more unique so yeah whole in for person this is Anton let's discuss some of the more unusual types of ice especially the ones discovered in just the last few years and more importantly talk about why this is kind of important and what this might mean for for astronomy and for science as a whole although I guess let's maybe start with a bit of a problem first this actually started back in the' 70s with the Voyager probe during the fly by A Voyager 2 close to both Uranus and Neptune it was able to measure their magnetic fields and the thing is something unusual was detected about these fields that even today is somewhat difficult to explain the magnetic fields of both of these planets are very unusual in terms of shape and structure for example the poles of these magnetic fields seem to be entirely misaligned with the rotation and also result in very strange very unpredictable shapes as well as somewhat unpredictable effects that were somewhat difficult to explain up until relatively recently and specifically until studies that started to examine what's probably happening inside Neptune and Uranus and why they're even getting these magnetic fields to begin with and it most likely has something to do with extremely pressurized water water that's no longer the water that we know here on Earth water that becomes somewhat different at very high pressures and temperatures to some extent it starts to resemble more of a metal and even act like one and is often referred to as super ionic water but before we talk about this let's basically talk about some of the modern discoveries from just the last few decades and it's actually the discoveries when it comes to water right here on planet Earth when scientists started to play around and started to basically pressurize it to some extreme pressures here we're talking about something that we usually find in planets like Jupiter and one of the main reasons this was done was to actually try to understand why water ice is so strange compared to other IES so for example in most liquids under high pressure they tend to freeze at higher temperatures and this is usually because the pressure helps to hold various molecules together but these strong hydrogen bonds in water make it somewhat different as a matter of fact under higher pressures and different temperatures water ice doesn't just form one thing it seems to form at least 19 separate phases of crystalline ice basically it doesn't just become one type of an ice it seems to become one of the 19 forms with extremely different looks and extremely different physical and chemical properties and so this type of ice is just one of 19 non crystalline phases of liquid water and it turns out to be possibly one of the rarest ones here's actually a rough phase diagram sh some of these forms but basically depending on the pressure and depending on the temperature you're going to end up with very different phases of water ice and so here is actually the list of some of these IES with many of them forming in very different conditions and this is of course something we've created here on planet Earth and something that can hypothetically exist on a lot of other planets but all of these ice forms usually refer to by their name with Roman numerals at the end so here's for example what ice 11 looks like a very unusual hexagonal shape in comparison here's what ice 12 looks like and here is an even stranger ice 16 and not only do they form very different Crystal structures they also have different properties many of them still unknown because most of these IES only exist in these very high pressures and usually high temperatures and so trying to create these conditions for a long time is still kind of difficult here's a somewhat more unusual looking i7 and potentially one of the most important types of IES out there are morphos ice this one is actually not a crystal but it seems to be the most common type of water so far discovered by various space missions now a morphos I unlike ice here on Earth does not form a crystalline structure it doesn't have this orderly formation instead it seems to be kind of similar to what basically glass is for the lack of better words it's disorderly molecules that form a solid object Al in case of a more common it's usually molecules containing silica but something extremely similar forms with water outside of planet Earth and interestingly enough most of the water discovered so far on a lot of different extraterrestrial objects including basically most dwarf planets and most asteroids are usually water in amorphous form basically these disorderly crystalline structures that seem to exist pretty much everywhere in a solar system and most likely everywhere in the galaxy and of course be Beyond it although I guess somewhat mysteriously when studying one of the dwarf planets known as quar unusually scientists discover that it seems to actually contain crystalline water basically water that does contain crystalline structure not the same crystals as on Earth but crystals that I've mentioned previously one of these more unusual forms that don't exist on Earth in this case is believed to be a result of a possible cry volcano emitting liquid water from within and forming crystalline structure on the surface of this object but the point is most water out there seems to be amorphous and definitely not the same as ice water or ice crystals that we're so used to on planet Earth in other words snowflakes are possibly unique to planet Earth at least to some extent I mean obviously if there's another planet with very similar conditions it might have similar I but it's quite likely that most ice out there is in very different forms and at least 15 of these ice crystals have been created on Earth and even recovered to be then kept in normal room temperatures so basically some of this ice can definitely exist permanently but what's even more interesting is that at higher pressures ice transitions into basically being a metal and because most of the water in the solar system is actually stuck inside various gas giants like Neptune and Uranus today we believe that this is most likely the most common type of water in the entire solar system and also potentially the most common type of water in the entire galaxy although it's actually unclear if the most common type would be this pressurized water inside various Gas Giants or the amorphous type of ice very often present on a surface of various asteroids and smaller bodies but both of these types of IES are probably the most common the hexagonal ice that we find on Earth is extremely unlikely to exist on a lot of different objects out there unless those objects have volcanism which has been sort of linked to the formation of hexagonal eyes but one of the most exciting types of IES discovered in the last few years is what's known as super ionic ice ice that forms from theorized Super ionic water something that happens at extremely high pressures of 500,000 bars and something that forms a very unusual cubic structure here all of the oxygens become linked in forming a permanent solid structure where then the hydrogens can basically flow without interacting with any of the oxygens and turns out that this formation or the actual flow of hydrogen then starts to produce very powerful magnetic fields and so the discovery of this ice 18 a few years ago was a pretty big breakthrough because it potentially allowed us to explain what happens inside some of the gas giants but F the breakthroughs from just like a year ago discovered another form known as ice 19 something that forms at even higher pressures and something that shifts some of the structure just a little bit thus affecting the overall magnetic field as well which surprisingly suddenly made sense for objects like Neptune and Uranus it sort of explained what happens within them and why the magnetic fields are so unusual and so weird it really seems to be just the result of pressure changes as you go deeper and deeper into these planets but basically for the most part they contain a lot of water within them that under certain pressures goes from being a gas to then becoming an ionic liquid to then becoming first type of super ionic solid here we're talking about ice 18 which then becomes ice 19 with all of these parts representing a large portion of the planet with all this discovered relatively recently by using a device known as The Diamond anvil in essence two different diamonds used to pressurize tiny tiny particles between them with some sort of a laser going through them used to control temperature and so here by pressurizing and increasing temperatures to the extreme it becomes possible to turn this into something like this for just a fraction of a second but this is usually enough to start studying various properties and various effects and so this super super hot possibly extremely dark ice that acts as both liquid and a solid at these high pressures that then transitions into something even more wild at higher pressures is basically the reason why neptun and Uranus have these somewhat strange magnetic fields that we could not understand before and though the actual properties are still not entirely clear and will still have to be studied a little bit more it's pretty clear that it's definitely worth studying mostly because this seems to be one of the most common types of water out there the majority of water in the entire universe is very likely in this form I mean assuming of course ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are just as common as we think and what's even stranger about this type of ice is that it seems to remain solid for a very very long time as a matter of fact it would require even higher temperatures dramatically higher temperatures to then start to possibly melt in place of course that the internal structure of these ice giantes to some extent is crystallized and to some extent is actually solid I mean obviously there's a lot of other stuff inside but for the most part most of it is in very different forms it's not really a gas anymore there is definitely a lot of solid on the inside and it's very very extreme but in terms of the differences between these two types of Isis 19 and 18 the newly discovered ice 19 definitely has more conductivity and thus possesses more magnetic field and so these two layers One internal and One external both forming slightly different fields is probably the reason why the magnetic fields in these planets are so different these unusual conductivity changes are most likely the reason why we see multipolar magnetic fields in both Uranus and Neptune and may also explain some of the other magnetic fields we still don't understand in a lot of other locations across the Galaxy and so basically when it comes down to it it all seems to be because of water but water that transitions into something entirely different compared to planet Earth and moreover the water on Earth and the ice on earth once again seem to be extremely unique compared to anything else out there I mean I'm not saying this is a rare earth hypothesis but I'm also not not saying that it's not wait triple negative anyway you get it right we've obviously discovered water pretty much everywhere out there but it's really not in the same form at all it is not liquid water and the ice water is not the same ice as what we have here and so trying to understand these differences is very important in order to understand everything about astrobiology everything about formation of Life on planet Earth and of course magnetic fields in various planets but we'll probably come back and talk more about this once someone discovers the mysterious ice 20 the next weird type of ice that's probably hiding behind some other properties we still don't understand and we actually discussed some of these previous discoveries in one of the videos in the description anyway on that note thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who L learn about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else support this channel patreon by joining Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description see you wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye-bye I see you later yeah that was horrible don't do that again [Music] [Music] for

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 146,920

Keywords: ice xix, ice xviii, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, water ice, ice on earth, new type of ice, extraterrestrial ice, unusual water ice, is water same everywhere, is ice same everywhere, ice xx, ice 19, new ice found, structure of ice, structure of water ice, hexagonal ice, tetragonal ice, hydrogen disordered ice, snowflake, snowflake shape, why are snowflakes 6 sized

Id: tNBv_U-95SM

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024