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By creating gold<\/a> hydride in the lab, researchers opened a way to study dense hydrogen like that inside giant planets and fusing stars.<\/p>\n Creating gold hydride<\/p>\n The work was led by Mungo Frost, a staff scientist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC<\/a>) whose research probes materials under extreme pressures and temperatures.<\/p>\n Gold is usually chosen for experiments like this because it barely reacts, serving as a passive X ray absorber that heats surrounding material.<\/p>\n Gold was expected to remain inert during the experiment, since it is normally chemically unreactive and is routinely used as an X-ray absorber for that reason.<\/p>\n That accidental reaction produced the first confirmed solid compound made solely of gold and hydrogen atoms in any laboratory experiment.<\/p>\n Lab built to study diamonds<\/p>\n The experiment was originally designed to clock how long simple hydrocarbons take to turn into diamond under crushing pressure and searing heat.<\/p>\n Researchers squeezed tiny drops of hydrocarbon between the tips of a diamond anvil cell, a device that traps samples at immense static pressures.<\/p>\n Laser heating inside such cells lets scientists study materials at extreme pressures, as shown in a recent review<\/a> of diamond anvil work.<\/p>\n At the European XFEL<\/a> in Germany, X-ray pulses hit a thin gold<\/a> foil in the sample, which then heated the surrounding hydrocarbons.<\/p>\n The team cranked the pressure until it rivaled Earth\u2019s lower mantle, then blasted the sample with trains of X-ray pulses.<\/p>\n Under those conditions, the study reports gold hydride forming at temperatures above 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and at pressures far beyond Earth\u2019s mantle<\/a>.<\/p>\n X-ray scattering patterns confirmed that carbon atoms snapped into the tidy lattice of diamond<\/a>, matching what the researchers expected from earlier work.<\/p>\n Signals in the data revealed hydrogen atoms entering the gold lattice, forming gold hydride that altered how the metal scattered X-rays.<\/p>\n Gold hydride and planet formation<\/p>\n Under pressure and heat, hydrogen became superionic, a state where atoms move like a liquid inside a solid, making the gold hydride conductive.<\/p>\n Hydrogen usually barely scatters X-rays, so the team watched changes in the gold<\/a> lattice to deduce how the light atoms were moving.<\/p>\n Simulations and measurements indicate that hydrogen diffuses rapidly through the hexagonal gold lattice at high temperature but separates when the sample cools.<\/p>\n Interior models<\/a> of Jupiter suggest a shell of metallic hydrogen surrounding a dense core, with pressures beyond anything on Earth\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n In those environments, hydrogen is compressed so tightly that it behaves more like a dense, electrically conducting fluid than a simple gas.<\/p>\n Recent research<\/a> has shown that superionic states in silica water and silica hydrogen mixtures could help explain magnetic fields in giant planets.<\/p>\n Gold hydride offers a controlled environment where dense hydrogen\u2019s structure and motion can be measured, giving theorists a clearer target for planetary calculations.<\/p>\n New lens on fusion research<\/p>\n Stars like the Sun shine because gravity squeezes hydrogen until nuclei fuse, and fusion researchers try to recreate conditions in experiments on Earth.<\/p>\n Accurate models of dense hydrogen, hydrogen compressed to extraordinary pressures and densities, are vital for understanding fusion fuel behavior.<\/p>\n Simulations indicate that even small uncertainties in hydrogen\u2019s behavior at high-density can significantly change fusion predictions.<\/p>\n By pinning how hydrogen moves through gold at given pressures and temperatures, the measurements give fusion modelers a benchmark to test their calculations.<\/p>\n In everyday chemistry, gold is grouped with the noble metals that rarely form compounds, which is why jewelry stays bright for decades.<\/p>\n In these experiments, gold<\/a> formed a hydride that held more hydrogen as pressure climbed, yet separated into plain gold again when conditions eased.<\/p>\n The findings indicate that extreme pressure and heat can enable forms of chemistry that do not occur under normal conditions.<\/p>\n High pressure work has shown unreactive elements like xenon can form compounds, so gold hydride underscores how chemistry changes when matter is squeezed.<\/p>\n High tech machines<\/p>\n The experiments relied on the European XFEL, a powerful X-ray laser facility that delivers thousands of pulses each second to targets.<\/p>\n Those pulses deposit energy in the gold foil, allowing scientists to heat the sample rapidly while the diamond-anvil cell maintains the pressure.<\/p>\n High-energy-density science, the study of matter under extreme pressures and temperatures, uses intense X-ray lasers together with diamond anvil cells.<\/p>\n As these tools improve, from tougher diamond anvils to brighter X-ray sources, researchers can probe states of matter once considered purely theoretical.<\/p>\n Gold hydrides and other exotic phases<\/p>\n Gold<\/a> hydride joins a catalog of exotic phases, including superionic water and silica compounds, that appear only when atoms are squeezed and heated.<\/p>\n Many of these phases vanish once pressure or temperature drops, yet their existence helps explain how planets move heat and generate magnetic fields.<\/p>\n Because hydrides of other metals already show properties like superconductivity, understanding gold hydride could one day help design new electronic materials.<\/p>\n Gold hydride\u2019s appearance under stress shows that even familiar elements in lab samples can behave unexpectedly when scientists push conditions beyond normal experience.<\/p>\n Lessons from gold hydride<\/p>\n The simulation framework that captured superionic hydrogen in gold<\/a> can predict how other elements behave when infused with hydrogen at different pressures and temperatures.<\/p>\n Future experiments can swap gold for other metals or mixtures that resemble planetary materials more closely, letting researchers test whether strange hydrides emerge.<\/p>\n Each compound uncovered at such extremes expands the periodic table of high-pressure phases and clarifies how ordinary elements behave when pushed hard.<\/p>\n The study is published in the National Library of Medicine<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a high-pressure lab experiment, scientists accidentally created a new compound called gold hydride. This particular hydride formed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[79],"class_list":{"0":"post-583106","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}