Professor Russel Hemly and Collaborators seek to measure the High Pressure Melting Curve of iron at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility

A new study appearing in Science suggests that Earth-like planets outside of the solar system are likely to have a longer duration of magnetically shielded habitability than Earth.  University of Illinois Chicago professor Russell Hemley and scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, along with other collaborators, sought to determine the high-pressure melting curve and structural properties of iron up to 1,000 GPa (nearly 10,000,000 atmospheres), which is three times the pressure of Earth’s inner core and nearly four times greater pressure than previous experiments conducted on the material.  Read more about the experiments at: https://today.uic.edu/measuring-the-melting-curve-of-iron-at-super-earth-core-conditions