By James Pero For Dailymail.com
Published: 17:30 BST, 10 May 2019 | Updated: 17:09 BST, 11 May 2019
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By zapping water with lasers, researchers were able to observe an 'exotic' hot ice that they say could exist throughout much of the universe.
The findings, published in Nature by scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, further observe the characteristics of a substance called superionic ice, created by the same lab last year.
Now, using giant lasers to flash freeze water, scientists say they have been able to observe the microscopic structure of the hybrid substance which acts like both a solid and a liquid.
Superionic ice acts as both a solid and a a liquid, leading researchers to describe the substance as 'exotic'. An artistic rendering is pictured
The OMEGA laser, located at the University of Rochester in New York, is among the most powerful lasers in the world.
It uses a 60 beams to test different types of plasma, radiation, and other materials.
Recently it was used by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to study the structure of superionic ice.
While the facility has been threatened with closure in recent years, it continues to be used to explore high-energy physics and other fields.
'We wanted to determine the atomic structure of superionic water,' said LLNL physicist Federica Coppari, who was co-lead author of the paper.
'But given the extreme conditions at which this elusive state of matter is predicted to be stable, compressing water to such pressures and temperatures and simultaneously taking snapshots of the atomic structure was an extremely difficult task, which required an innovative experimental design.'
To conduct their observations, researchers say they employed one of the most powerful lasers in the world, the OMEGA Laser, at University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
The six lasers were used to generate
