By therandomsci / February 12, 2021
Water is weird. It exists in many forms. On earth, it has 3 forms solid, liquid, and gas. Because water makes life possible. Most chemicals have one solid form but water has seventeen or more. And while there’s only the one on Earth, we expect to find these exotic forms of ice in space.
Temperature and pressure have a big influence on the molecular arrangement and how they stable themselves. There are many different kinds of ice because of the unique chemistry of water molecules.
The oxygen atom in a water molecule has two hydrogens and has two lone pairs of electrons. Due to the negative charge of electrons, they repel each other. So, these electrons take up space and stick to the oxygen molecule. They shuffle around to be as far away from each other as possible, and that takes the form of a tetrahedron with oxygen in the center. The hydrogen atoms and electron pairs on different water molecules can form hydrogen bonds with one another – one hydrogen with one electron pair. As long as every water molecule is neatly hydrogen-bonded with its neighbors in a crystalline form, that’s solid ice. But tetrahedrons can fit together in more than one way. With a little change in the temperature or the pressure, the molecules will shift to a different crystalline form.
There are about seventeen of these crystalline forms. This means that there are about 17 different forms of water. It is predicted that there could be more because it is hard to achieve the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to make all of them in a lab. There are also forms of ice that have been predicted to exist in computer models and simulations.
Amorphous Ice, they do not have an orderly repeated crystalline structure.
Superionic Ices, where the oxygen atoms are locked into a crystal lattice but the hydrogen atom are free to move.
Some examples, Superionic ice probably exists on Uranus and Neptune, the ice giant planets.
Some scientists think this is due to the strange magnetic field properties that have been observed on those planets.
An exoplanet called Gliese 436b is thought to host a whole bunch of super-hot ice X.
The surface temperature of this exoplanet is estimated to be 439 degrees Celsius. This is due to the temperature-pressure relationship.
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