Journey to the centre of Jupiter (Image: NASA/JPL?SSI)
WHAT kind of matter would you expect to find inside a giant planet? A strange transparent metal created by firing an X-ray laser at aluminium might hold some clues.
To create this exotic state of matter, researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany, took a thin piece of aluminium foil and blasted it with an X-ray laser that generated about 10 million gigawatts of power per square centimetre. At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions surrounded by a sea of free electrons. Each photon…
