Not Ice-Nine

[Alpine]

Hello World.

As always I wasn't sure where to make this thread but I suppose Chemistry fits it well. According to "Discovery Channel's Planet Earth" a fourth phase of water has been found or will be found.

To quote Discovery Channel's post on Facebook

Super cool new water form found

 

Now to quote the article

Besides vapor, ice and liquid, a fourth form of water may exist, but don't worry, Kurt Vonnegut fans, it's not ice-nine, the dangerous, solid at room temperature substance from the book Cat's Cradle. Unlike the fictional ice-nine, which melted at 114 degrees Fahrenheit, this new form of H2O likes it cold, about 54 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

 

Liquid water usually freezes into ice at 32 Fahrenheit, but under the right conditions, like the high pressure at the bottom of the ocean, water stays liquid below 32 Fahrenheit.

 

Water's fourth form, or phase, may be a liquid with some of the properties of both ice and regular liquid water. But laboratory equipment isn't sensitive enough to observe the rapid transformation from regular liquid water to the fourth form.

 

Researchers Pradeep Kumar and H. Eugene Stanley used a computer simulation to model the elusive liquid. They found that at about 54 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the local structure of water seems to become extremely ordered, like ice, while undergoing sharp but continuous structural changes and remaining liquid.

 

Oddly, at this temperature the water also became more conductive of heat, the opposite of what happens with regular liquid water and ice, as anyone living in an igloo will tell you.

 

 

The strange behavior of water at low temperatures is what led Stanley and Kumar to believe that their results support the idea that water has a fourth phase.

 

Of course the article isn't correct in scientific terms but whoa this is exciting. A new form! Any thoughts on this one?

 

Also before logging off I'll just throw this around, IF IT EXISTS, then which state of matter will this new phase come under? Solid? Liquid? Gaseous? Or Bose-Einstein Condensate? Or maybe a completely new state? :blink:

 

Link to the website: http://news.discovery.com/earth/new-water-super-cool-below-zero-111111.html#mkcpgn=fbdsc6

[CraigD]

Hello World.

IF IT EXISTS, then which state of matter will this new phase come under? Solid? Liquid? Gaseous? Or Bose-Einstein Condensate? Or maybe a completely new state? :blink:

As best I can guess, it's a supercooled liquid state, though a few degrees cooler than any I’ve heard of before. If you slowly cool very clean water, it’ll stay liquid well below 0 C.

 

It’s clearly not solid, as it flows under the force of gravity to fill its container, nor gas, as it doesn’t expand to fill its container. At about 225 K, it’s much warmer than the near 0 K of a typical BEC, and nothing in the article suggests it behaves like one, so I can see no reason to suspect it’s that.

 

Of course the article isn't correct in scientific terms but whoa this is exciting. A new form! Any thoughts on this one?

Just as water ice has 15 well-identified sub-phases (or a few more, depending on how you count them), I expect that careful study of can identify many different characteristic states of liquid water. The number of these states appear to me to be more a function of how carefully we study water (or any liquid) than an previously unknown, important datum.

 

Knowledge about the many states of water is mostly important, I think, in what it tells us about the many ways ice forms and melts. Work like Kumar and Stanley’s computer simulations is important somewhat, I think, in what it may tell us about the many ways water and other ice forms and melts, but mostly as work in using computers to explore scientific theories.

[Alpine]

Nice insight Craig. Thank you. :D

Upon a little more research through Wikipedia and other sources it seems that the number of states have increased from what my outdated textbook says (it's about time they update it).

 

Quark-gluon plasma

Degenerate matter (A hypothesis but it seems to be reasonable to me)

Superfluids

Fermionic condensates

Rydberg molecules

Quantum Hall states

 

Wow.

It's amazing how far we have reached. BUT it seems to me that most of these states are just manipulated versions of each other. My best guess is that this new phase is something between Superfluid and liquid or maybe a modification of superfluid. Would love to know more about this new fuss we have created.

 

Btw, before any further development in this field, I would like to name this new state Dave. :D