91av

Space

Weird water lurking inside giant planets

By David Shiga

1 September 2010

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Don’t bother with a compass

(Image: JPL/NASA)

WHAT glows yellow and behaves like a liquid and a solid at the same time? Water – at least in the strange form it appears to take deep within Uranus and Neptune. This exotic stuff might help explain why both planets have bizarre magnetic fields.

in 1999 and an in 2005 hinted that water might behave like both a solid and a liquid at very high pressures and temperatures. Under such conditions, the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the water molecules would become ionised, with the oxygen ions forming a lattice-like…

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