News JVTech This icy material can help us discover extraterrestrial life
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The existence of potential extraterrestrial life has always fascinated us. In fact, many fantasies have been born since the 1950s and the start of the space race. Studies follow one another, but some could be crucial in discovering extraterrestrial life.
Ice is a state of water, like any liquid or gaseous state. These different modes are obtained when the water is in an environment with certain temperature conditions. Above 100°C water boils and evaporates, below 0°C water freezes. Scientists at London College University in Cambridge have discovered a slightly different form of ice than we know. The substance has completely disorganized molecules for ice and looks like a hybrid form of liquid water and crystals. Because of this discovery, scientists imagined that this form of ice could also exist on other planets.
Water is the basis of all life. Our existence depends on it, we sent rockets to find it, but from a scientific point of view it’s all still difficult to understand.
Professor Christoph Salzmann speaks here of the difficulty of understanding all the properties of water, but above all of the physical requirements for it to be able to expand on a planet. The earth is covered with water in liquid form and the climatic conditions allow us to experience all water states (liquid, gaseous, solid).
In one experiment, scientists used a ball milling method to shake water ice with steel balls in a container kept at -200°C. Instead of breaking the ice like they thought They got a kind of amorphous ice between liquid and solid…Even at this temperature.
Unlike other forms of ice, scientists have found that this material, or “new state,” has a very amorphous density with a much less organized molecular structure.
Life very close to us?
But then what is the connection with extraterrestrial life? As has long been known, some planets in the solar system, such as Jupiter and Saturn, are gaseous. Scientists believe the density of these planets can produce completely amorphous ice material similar to what was discovered in the experiment.
Ganymede, Saturn’s largest moon
By heating this amorphous ice and then running it through a recrystallization process, the scientists found that the material began to emit heat. This type of event could very well justify movements on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Under its crust, scientists believe Ganymede contains more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
This could justify even very primitive life forms like unicellular microbes. The very low density of an amorphous ice could justify very good temperatures and conditions for the development of life forms. Of course, this only works on paper and via computer simulations by scientists.
