Scientists simulate Earth's outer core conditions in the laboratory

Thousands of km under Earth's surface, under crushing pressures (135-330 Gigapascals) and scorching temperatures (3,727- 3,796º C), the core of the planet can be found. There, an inner core consisting of a solid ball of nickel and iron is super-rotating inside the outer core, where the iron and nickel are fluid.

The conditions of this outer core have now been recreated in a lab by scientists using an optical laser, by such a way they have been able to observe the structural deformation of Iron.

This has implications for understanding our own planet, and help us to better understand what happens when chunks of iron collide in space.

Under normal Earth conditions, the crystal structure of Iron is a cubic lattice. The atoms are arranged in a grid, with atoms at the corner of each cube, and one at the center. When Iron is compressed under extremely high pressures, this lattice changes shape, deforming into a hexagonal structure. This allows more atoms to be packed into the same volume of space.

To measure the atomic structure, the team freeze the atoms and used X-ray. They were able to make a measurement in a billionth of a second.

The resulting images, revealed that Iron crystal lattice becomes so compressed that some of the lattice points become shared by multiple crystals in a symmetrical manner.

For iron at outer terrestrial core conditions, this means that the atomic arrangement gets pushed so that the hexagonal shapes rotate by nearly 90 degrees. This mechanism allows the metal to withstand extremity.

This has important implications for the way to understand space collisions.