Mysterious new substance possibly discovered inside Earth's core

According to a new study, the inner core of Earth may be filled with a strange substance.

For more than half a century, scientists believed that the deepest part of Earth was a molten outer core surrounding a dense ball of iron. New research published in the journal Nature offers a rare insight into the inner structure of the planet and it is far weirder than previously thought.

New computer simulations suggest that the Earth's hot and highly pressurized inner core could exist in a superionic state.

50 interesting facts about Earth.

The researchers wrote in their paper that they found that hydrogen, oxygen and carbon in hexagonal close-packed iron transform to a superionic state under the inner core conditions.

Scientists and science fiction authors have long speculated about the contents of the planet, which is as hot as the surface of the sun. Since the 1950s, advances in the study of earthquake-generated seismic waves have allowed researchers to make more refined guesses as to what is inside the heart of the planet.

The inner core of Earth isn't solid iron, as was revealed in a study of how a shear wave moved through our planet.

Scientists weren't sure what this mush was. The researchers used a simulation to recreate the effects of the core's extreme pressures and temperatures on an assortment of likely scenarios, because access to the core by probe is impossible. In a regular solid, atoms arrange themselves into repeating grids, but the core simulations suggest that in Earth's core, atoms would be transformed into a superionic alloy.

The study's author, Yu He, said that the solidification of iron at the inner core boundary did not change the mobility of the light elements.

If the simulation lines up with reality, the constant swilling of the superionic materials could help to explain why the inner core seems to change so much over time. The model will have to be proven.

We will have to wait until the experimental setting becomes ripe to replicate the inner core conditions and scrutinize the proposed models. The head of seismology and mathematical geophysics at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that they would see which of the models were physical.

It was originally published on Live Science.