What is Metallic Hydrogen?
a. In this form, hydrogen does not produce gravity. b. In this form, hydrogen is radioactive. c. In this form, hydrogen is an excellent insulator to both heat and electricity. d. In this form, hydrogen is rigid and shiny. e. In this form, hydrogen is an excellent conductor of electricity. 20. Why can an outer planets moon the size of the planet Mercury have a thick atmosphere when Mercury itself has none? a. If the moon formed more recently than Mercury, it may still have its atmosphere but will eventually lose it. b. The moon is outgassing its atmosphere, so that the atmosphere is continually regenerated. c. The temperature in the outer Solar System is low enough that the gases in the moons atmosphere do not reach escape velocity. d. Because of the concentration of gases in the vicinity of a Jovian planet, the moon formed in an unusually dense environment. e. The moons in the outer Solar System are subject to frequent impacts from the icy bodies the atmosphere can arise from the gaseo
Metallic hydrogen is a sort of super-compressed hydrogen found in the cores of gas giants and stars. As hydrogen tops the Periodic Table’s alkali metal column, it has been known for a while it has the potential to be a metal, but only under extreme pressures. Metallic hydrogen is crushed so closely that the atomic nuclei are separated only by a dense electron soup which flows between them. It is significantly less dense than neutronium, however, where the electrons merge together with the protons in hydrogen to make neutrons. Like all metals, metallic hydrogen is conductive and requires an electrical current to measure the presence of metallization. Metallic hydrogen was only synthesized under laboratory conditions as recently as 1996, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It only existed for about a microsecond, and required temperatures of thousands of degrees and pressure over a million atmospheres to achieve. This was a surprise, as it was previously thought that solid (ve
