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Strange Alien World Made of "Hot Ice"
David Shiga writes "The smallest planet ever seen passing in front of its parent star is a strange world of scorching hot ice, astronomers say. The 22-Earth-mass planet has been known since 2004, but recent observations of it passing in front of its parent star have allowed them to learn much more about it. It appears to be made mostly of water, but not in liquid form. The planet orbits so close to its parent star that its surface is a broiling 300 C, keeping any water there in vapor form. Beneath the atmosphere, the water is even hotter, but is at such high pressure because of the planet's large mass that it stays in a solid, "hot ice" form."
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer as gleaned from the link above if people don't want to bother clicking: yes; the Z-machine at Sandia is able (at least) to form Ice VII.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
No, we have confirmed the existence of water on other planets in our own solar system. Even Jupiter has water vapor in its clouds and Europa is covered in it. Even comets have a bunch of it. It's liquid water that's harder to come by. We're not so much looking for water as much as we are looking for water that can harbor life.
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I belive that is only applicable for Ice I[h] (normal ice). One property for such phase transition diagrams is that the solid is less dense than the liquid, rather than the reverse being true. There are several crystaline (and possibly non-crystaline?) forms of ice, which are more dense than water at the same pressure. These types of ice wouldn't match that phase diagram and could exist.
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there are actually 14 different types of solid water. my guess is they're talking about Amorphous ice ..wikipedia.
Also, I believe the 300C temperature is that of the water vapour in the atmosphere.
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One word: spectroscopy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A fantastic H2O Phase Diagram can be found here (http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html). At 300C (573 K) you can have ice; you just need a lot of pressure. That kind of pressure is in the several gigapascal range (x10^9 Pa, 1 GPa145,000 psi). Any ice that has a designation (e.g. Ice I, Ice Ih, Ice II, III, V, VII, X, etc.) has a set crystal structure. As you can see on the phase diagram you can have ice at very high temperatures if you have enough pressure. What is present on the planet mentioned in the article is strictly dependent on the pressure and temperature conditions there, which we do not really know.