Eventually, we believe that this will deepen our understanding of the liquid metallic core and magma deep within the Earth and other rocky planets. "We expect that the technological innovations achieved in this study will dramatically accelerate research on liquids under high pressures. Iron is a metal in group VIII of the periodic table with atomic number 26, an atomic weight of 55.85, and a density of 7.86. Yoichi Nakajima, one of the main members of the research collaboration. "Worldwide, many attempts to measure the density, speed of sound, and structure of liquids under ultrahigh pressures using laser-heated diamond cells have been made for over 30 years, but none have been successful so far," said Dr. This revelation is a big step towards estimating the chemical composition of the core - a first-class problem in Earth Science. Oxygen, which has been regarded as a major impurity in the past, cannot explain the density difference, suggesting the presence of other light elements. Comparing the outer core density to the experimental measurements in this study finds that pure iron is about 8% more dense than that of the Earth's outer core. Data was collected at various temperatures and pressures then combined with previous shock-wave data to calculate density for conditions over the entire Earth's core.Ĭurrently, the best way to estimate the density of the Earth's outer core is from seismic observations. Additionally, the sound speed profile of the liquid was measured under extreme conditions up to 450,000 atm. The current work improves upon these measurements by using the high-intensity X-ray at the SPring-8 facility to measure the X-ray diffraction of liquid iron under ultra-high pressures and high temperatures, and applies a novel analytical method to calculate the liquid density. Previous high-pressure liquid iron density measurements claimed that it was about 10% higher than the density of liquid iron under core conditions, but the shock compression experiments used were assumed to have a large error. However, this first requires an accurate measurement of the density of pure liquid iron at extreme pressure and temperature similar to the molten core so densities can be compared.Īs pressure rises, the melting point of iron also rises, which makes it difficult to study the density of liquid iron under ultra-high pressure. Identifying the type and amount of these light elements will allow for a better understanding of the origin of the Earth, specifically the materials that made up the Earth and the environment at the core when it separated from the mantle. Since the main component of the outer core is iron, and its density is considerably lower than that of pure iron, it was thought to contain a large amount of light elements like hydrogen and oxygen. Previously reported data for thermal expansion are giving a wider range of degrees of freedom.The Earth has a solid metal inner core and a liquid metal outer core located some 2,900 km (1,800 mi) below the surface, both of which are under very high pressures and temperatures. It is shown that expansivities of the present study are giving heat capacities at constant volume in the range 3R-4R which is in good accordance with theory predicting 3R as the ionic contribution and about 1R as the electronic contribution. Solid-like viscoelastic behavior in the low-Q region is suggested as a possible cause of such anomaly while shear components would contribute noticeably to reduce the liquid compressibility. Comparison of the specific heat ratios γ calculated with the results of this study with those obtained using structural data from diffraction experiments shows large and even non-physical discrepancies, e.g., in the case of Mn. The density at the melting point and the coefficient of thermal expansion are in accordance with those of other studies. In the temperature range studied, the density behaves linearly with temperature. An extensive study of sources of random and systematic errors has shown a maximum error of 0.75% in absolute density measurements. New experimental data for the density and the coefficient of thermal expansion of pure liquid Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Al and Sn at temperatures between melting and 1973K using the γ-ray attenuation technique are reported.
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