sublimation

In the dark chamber of the trap, thousands of charged particles dance under electric fields. At first they move freely, like a crowd in a square, but cool the cloud and the dance slows: ions begin to sense each other, their steps become constrained.

In the furnace of star formation, the heat reaches 900 degrees Celsius, like a glowing blast furnace. It is in this hellish heat that cosmic crystals are born. Astronomers have for the first time caught the moment when crystalline dust appears right during an accretion flare (when the star gobbles up surrounding gas) at the very young star EC 53, still cocooned in dense gas.

The star AB Aur is young, about 4 million years old. Around it swirls a dense disk of gas and dust. Recently, a long gas stream, a flow of material from the surrounding cloud, crashed into it.

Quantum matter rarely treats us to the spectacle of self-motion. Where the classical world teems with starling murmurations, fish schools, and bustling bacteria, quantum thermodynamics long remained serene.

Using the JWST space telescope, astronomers conducted a chemical analysis of the centaur Chiron, an icy body from the fringes of the Solar System. It turns out its gas activity resembles a layered cake. Carbon dioxide evaporates from the surface, forming a top crust.

An old chest of family heirlooms opens, and inside lie jewels that were thought to be as old as great-grandmother. But suddenly it turns out: the gold was remelted, the stones were recut, and this happened much later than thought. A similar story happened to the oldest particles in meteorites — calcium-aluminum inclusions, or CAIs.

Molecules in a solution behave like a crowd in a square: they can jostle randomly or line up in neat rows. An aqueous solution of disodium cromoglycate is a well-known model for chromonic liquid crystals, where such 'rows' form spontaneously. But if you shine ultraviolet light on the solution, order collapses: molecules start breaking apart.

A crystal of calcium ions in a trap, illuminated by a laser, is a tiny model of the matter inside a white dwarf. There, in the depths of a dying star, atomic nuclei arrange into a rigid lattice as the temperature drops.

Vanadium oxide is a material that can act as an insulator, not conducting electricity, or as a conductor, like a metal. The switch takes trillionths of a second, and that's what makes it a candidate for ultrafast electronic devices. But exactly how it happens has long been a mystery.

A thin stream of water flows down a cold inclined board and, before your eyes, turns into an ice ridge. At first, the water paves itself a straight icy path, as if reinforcing its own banks. Then the trickle starts to meander, and the ice quickly spreads sideways. Finally, the ridge stops growing outward and begins to thicken, smoothing out irregularities.

The second interstellar guest, comet 3I/ATLAS, shines unusually due to rusting metal grains in its icy core. As it gets closer to the Sun, it behaves like an old tin can tossed into a fire: the heat melts the ice, water seeps into the metal, and vigorous corrosion begins.