Water frozen in the darkness of space doesn’t appear to behave the way we thought.
A new research effort using computer simulations and experiments to explore the most common form water takes in the Universe has found that it is not as structureless as scientists had thought. Rather, repeating patterns – otherwise known as crystals – just a few nanometers across are likely embedded in an otherwise frozen jumble of molecules.
Since scientists had thought space too cold for ice crystals to have the energy to form, this discovery comes as a big surprise.