Despite outward appearances, the internal workings of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune are extremely chaotic. Pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s sea level combine with temperatures in the thousands of degrees to make some pretty weird materials. Now, a new paper from researchers at the Carnegie Institution, published in Nature Communications, describes a completely new state of matter that might exist in these extreme environments - a “quasi-1D superionic” phase. Scientists have known for a long time these ice planets aren’t made with normal “ices” as we might think of them on Earth. Instead they are composed of a hot, dense slurry of water, ammonia and methane. But recreating the conditions that create that slurry in a lab are next to impossible. It would require terapascals of pressure at high enough temperatures to melt most containers.…