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The labs that forge distant planets here on Earth

High-pressure experiments explore what it might take to make exoplanets habitable
  1. Shannon Hall

    1. Shannon Hall is a freelance journalist based in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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Painting of exoplanet

Could super-Earths such as the one depicted here host geology similar to Earth’s? Credit: M. Kornmesser/Nick Risinger/ESO

Yingwei Fei and his colleagues had spent a month carefully crafting the three slivers of dense silicate — shiny and round, each sample was less than a millimetre thick. But in early November, it was time to say goodbye. Fei carefully packed the samples, plus a few back-ups, in foam and shipped them from Washington DC to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, the Z Pulsed Power Facility at Sandia National Laboratories will soon send 26 million amps surging towards the slivers, zapping them, one by one, into dust.

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Nature 552, 20-22 (2017)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-07844-y

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