Metallic hydrogen is a highly compressed form of hydrogen found in gas giants and stars. It was first synthesized in 1996 under extreme laboratory conditions and may have the potential to be a room temperature superconductor. It is thought to exist in the cores of Jupiter, Saturn, and the Sun.
Metallic hydrogen is a kind of supercompressed hydrogen found in the cores of gas giants and stars. Because hydrogen ranks at the top of the alkali metal column of the periodic table, it has long been known that it has the potential to be a metal, but only at extreme pressures. Metallic hydrogen is squeezed so tightly that atomic nuclei are separated only by a thick soup of electrons flowing between them. It is significantly less dense than neutronium, however, where electrons fuse together with protons in hydrogen to form neutrons. Like all metals, this is conductive and requires an electric current to measure the presence of metallisation.
This material was only synthesized under laboratory conditions as recently as 1996 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It only existed for about a microsecond and required temperatures of thousands of degrees and pressures of over a million atmospheres to achieve. This was a surprise, as solid (very cold) hydrogen was previously thought to be needed to produce metallic hydrogen. Previous experiments had subjected solid hydrogen to pressures of up to 2.5 million atmospheres, with the absence of any detectable metallization, so the experiment involving the compression of hot hydrogen was set up to measure other properties of the material, not with l intend to produce metallic hydrogen. However, this is how it was first made.
Although the metallic hydrogen produced at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was solid, it has been theorized that it might be possible to create a liquid version, if using even higher pressures, around 4 million atmospheres. Calculations also determined that this material could be a room temperature superconductor, although this property would be somewhat useless for practical purposes, as the cost of compressing something to over a million atmospheres over a long period of time is much greater compared to cooling something close to absolute zero. However, there is a small chance that metastable metallic hydrogen may be possible, i.e. one that retains its phase even when pressure is removed.
Metallic hydrogen is thought to exist in the cores of our solar system’s largest gas giants: Jupiter and Saturn, as well as a shell of hydrogen near the core of the Sun.
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