Tag: Liquid

Posted on

Surface Tension by John Hawkhead

surface tension
she dips a toe
into my silence

by John Hawkhead

Surface tension is the tendency of at-rest liquid surfaces to shrink into the minimum surface area possible. This allows objects with higher density than water to float on its surface without becoming submerged.

Surface tension results from the greater attraction of liquid molecules to each other (cohesion) than to air molecules (adhesion).

Further reading:

‘Surface tension’, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/).

Enjoyed John’s sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Dark matter’, ‘Chirality’, ‘Spooky Interaction’, ‘Dancing’, ‘Planetarium’, ‘Empty Space’, ‘Averages’, ‘New Beginning’, and ‘Interactions’.

This sciku was previous published in Human/Kind: A Journal of Topical and Contemporary Japanese Short-forms and Art, issue 1:1, p14.

Posted on

Diamond Rain

Does Neptune ever
feel lonely, with a wall of
diamonds round it’s heart?

Diamonds might be precious but they’re composed of carbon, an element that’s common here on Earth and throughout the universe.

Under the right conditions (pressure and heat) carbon turns into diamonds. Marvin Ross predicted in 1981 that such conditions might be found in the mantels of the Solar System’s ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.

Recent research has supported this, with laser shock experiments on polystyrene performed by Kraus et al. (2017) replicating the conditions approximately 10,000km below the surfaces of Neptune and Uranus. Their experiments created nanodiamonds, supporting evidence that diamond precipitation occurs in the mantels of these planets.

Now further research has strengthened this evidence. The earlier studies used pure hyrdrocarbon systems (polystyrene is C8H8) but the interiors of Neptune and Uranus are more complex than that, consisting mainly of a dense fluid mixture of water (H2O), methane (CH4), and ammonia (NH3).

To understand diamond formation under more complex conditions similar to those found on Neptune and Uranus, Zhiyu et al. (2022) investigated diamond formation using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics (C10H8O4). The researchers found that diamond formation is likely to be enhanced by the presence of oxygen, which in their research accelerated the splitting of the carbon and hydrogen.

Under the conditions found on Neptune and Uranus it’s likely that much larger diamonds would be formed, potentially millions of carats in weight. Over millennia these vast diamonds are predicted to sink slowly through the icy layers of the mantel before melting near the cores, creating an ever changing layer of diamonds around the cores of the planets.

The latest research may also explain another peculiarity about Neptune and Uranus: their unusual magnetic fields. Under the conditions that form diamonds in the mantel, the researchers also found evidence that superionic water might be created. Superionic water conducts electric current and is likely to impact the planets’ magnetic fields.

In addition to learning more about the Universe, there are practical implications for us on Earth resulting from the research too. Nanodiamonds have a range of important uses, including in medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics. This latest research points the way towards a new way of fabricating nanodiamonds for such uses.

Further reading:

Ross, M. (1981) The ice layer in Uranus and Neptune—diamonds in the sky? https://doi.org/10.1038%2F292435a0

Kraus, D. et al. (2017) Formation of diamonds in laser-compressed hydrocarbons at planetary interior conditions https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0219-9

Zhiyu, H.E. et al. (2022) Diamond formation kinetics in shock-compressed C─H─O samples recorded by small-angle x-ray scattering and x-ray diffraction https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo0617

Posted on

Mars

If you say water

then we say volcanism,

else Mars is too cold.

Recent observations of Mars have suggested the presence of liquid water beneath the ice at the South Pole, prompting researchers to ask how water could exist in liquid state under Mars’ environmental conditions.

Research by Soria and Bramson (2019) suggests that the most likely theory to explain the presence of water would be an underground source of heat such as the formation of a magma chamber in the area within the past few hundred thousand years. The researchers also suggest the reverse is true – if there isn’t such a heat source then it’s unlikely that the earlier suggestions of liquid water are correct.

Original reseach: http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2018GL080985

Posted on

Renegade liquid

Renegade liquid –

negative mass pushing back

breaking second law.

 

One of the fundamental aspects of Newton’s second law states is that when an object has a force applied to it, it moves in the same direction as the net force. Khamehchi et al (2017) created a liquid of negative effective mass (a Bose-Einstein condensate) that breaks this principle: when it is pushed it accelerates towards the pusher.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.155301