{"id":218963,"date":"2025-07-29T08:29:43","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T13:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/gold-does-something-unexpected-when-superheated-past-its-melting-point"},"modified":"2025-07-29T08:29:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T13:29:43","slug":"gold-does-something-unexpected-when-superheated-past-its-melting-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/gold-does-something-unexpected-when-superheated-past-its-melting-point","title":{"rendered":"Gold Does Something Unexpected When Superheated Past Its Melting Point"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/gold-does-something-unexpected-when-superheated-past-its-melting-point.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Gold remains perfectly solid when briefly heated beyond previously hypothesized limits, a new study reports, which may mean a complete reevaluation of how matter behaves under extreme conditions.<\/p>\n<p>The international team of scientists behind the study used intense, super-short laser blasts to push thin fragments of gold past a limit known as the <a href=\"https:\/\/ui.adsabs.harvard.edu\/link_gateway\/1988Natur.334\u202650F\/doi:10.1038\/334050a0\">entropy catastrophe<\/a>; the point at which a solid becomes too hot to resist melting. It\u2019s like a melting point, but for edge cases where the physics isn\u2019t conventional.<\/p>\n<p>In a phenomenon called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Superheating\">superheating<\/a>, a solid can be heated too quickly for its atoms to have time enter a liquid state. Crystals can remain intact way past their standard melting point, albeit for a very, very brief amount of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gold remains perfectly solid when briefly heated beyond previously hypothesized limits, a new study reports, which may mean a complete reevaluation of how matter behaves under extreme conditions. The international team of scientists behind the study used intense, super-short laser blasts to push thin fragments of gold past a limit known as the entropy catastrophe; [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}