The discovery could explain the red streaks across Jupiter's moon Europa that match no known substance on Earth.
."Salt and water are very well known in Earth conditions. But beyond that, we're totally in the dark. And now we have these planetary objects that probably have compounds that are very familiar to us but in very exotic conditions."
These two newly discovered compounds are also hydrates but are also very different from sodium chloride. One of the compounds has two sodium chloride molecules for every 17 molecules of water. The other has one sodium chloride molecule for every 13 water molecules. A crystal of a completely new type of salty ice that was previously unknown on Earth but could exist on icy moons in the solar system.
"We were trying to measure how adding salt would change the amount of ice we could get since salt acts as an antifreeze," Journaux said."Surprisingly, when we put the pressure on, what we saw is that these crystals that we were not expecting started growing. It was a very serendipitous discovery."
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