Recent research into the Earth’s core leads scientists to believe that the center consists of a new mysterious substance that is neither solid nor liquid in a “superionic state”.
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Scientists believe that Earth’s inner core may be filled with a strange substance that is a mushy mixture of solid and liquid, a new study reveals.
Recent research published earlier this month claimed that our planet’s core may be made of something other than a liquid outer core surrounding a solid sphere of solid iron alloy as previously theorized.
The study’s computer simulations suggest that the hot, high-pressure core of the Earth could be a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon molecules, which exist in a “superionic state” through an iron lattice, Live Science reports.
The study published on February 9 in Nature reads: “We found that hydrogen, oxygen and carbon in tightly packed hexagonal iron change to a superionic state in the deep core of the Earth, indicating a high diffusion coefficient like that of a liquid.”
“This shows that the inner core can be in a superionic state rather than the normal solid state. Seismic movements can make the earth split in two,” wrote the Daily Star in its news Thursday (24/2/2022),
The center of the planet is believed to be as hot as the sun’s surface, but its composition has baffled experts since the earliest studies of earthquakes in the 1950s.
But it’s advances in the study of seismic waves that allow researchers to make more subtle guesses about what’s inside Earth t but even now we don’t know for sure.
(wbs)
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