Metallic Hydrogen Could Revolutionize Rocket Fuel

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

Date posted: 01/30/17

Tia Ghose reports that metallic hydrogen, an interesting form of the element that conducts electricity even at low temperatures, has finally been made in the lab, 80 years after physicists predicted its existence. Scientists managed to create the elusive, electrically conductive hydrogen by squeezing it to incredibly high pressures between two ultrapure diamonds, the researchers reported in a new study. No one has ever encountered metallic hydrogen because it has never existed on Earth before, Isaac Silvera, a condensed-matter physicist at Harvard University, told Live Science. Probably the conditions in the universe are such that it has never even existed in the universe. In theory, it is possible that metallic hydrogen could be used as an ultralight, extremely powerful rocket fuel, Silvera added, if one could scale it up and make large quantities of it, it could revolutionize rocketry, Silvera said. This could also be helpful in producing magnetic-levitating trains or MRI machines that do not require the material to be cooled to liquid helium temperatures.