Scientists at the University of Chicago claim that they’ve managed to create a “strange” new state of matter in the lab called “superionic ice” – and that the stuff might already exist inside planets in our solar system.

“It was a surprise — everyone thought this phase wouldn’t appear until you are at much higher pressures than where we first find it,” said Vitali Prakapenka, co-author and University of Chicago researcher. “But we were able to very accurately map the properties of this new ice, which constitutes a new phase of matter, thanks to several powerful tools.”

Producing unfathomable pressure

Prakapenka’s team made use of a particle accelerator to fire electrons between two pieces of diamond, creating pressures of 20 gigapascals in a sample of water that caused it to form an entirely new structure that changed back when the pressure was relieved.

“Imagine a cube, a lattice with oxygen atoms at the corners connected by hydrogen,” Prakapenka said in the press blurb. “When it transforms into this new superionic phase, the lattice expands, allowing the hydrogen atoms to migrate around while the oxygen atoms remain steady in their positions. It’s kind of like a solid oxygen lattice sitting in an ocean of floating hydrogen atoms.”

Testing new state’s properties

The paper about the study has been published in the journal Nature. Prakapenka said the team now aims to study the new state’s properties, and what happens when it is mixed with other materials. The team also suspects that conditions inside Uranus and Neptune might give rise to the new state in a natural way. “This should stimulate a lot more studies,” he added.

Recently, researchers created and captured images of a Wigner crystal: a material that is completely made of electrons, which was first theorized 90 years ago. However, it was done practically for the first time. The researchers managed to arrange the electrons into a honeycomb-like lattice by sandwiching them in an electric field between two atom-thin layers of tungsten compounds.