You already know that water freezes. At zero degrees, the disordered chaos of liquid molecules suddenly snaps into a regular, repeating pattern into an ice crystal, through a process physicists call a phase transition. It is one of the most familiar things in nature. What is considerably less familiar is the idea that space and time can do exactly the same thing and when they do, what emerges is not ice, it’s a black hole. A close up of ice crystals displaying typical hexagonal symmetry (Credit : Maxim Bilovitskiy) It may seem like it but this is not science fiction, it’s the conclusion of a new study published in Physical Review Letters by researchers from TU Wien in Vienna and Goethe University Frankfurt. They have for the first time, derived an exact mathematical formula describing one of these strange theoretical objects in physics and they’re known as a spacetime crystal. Black holes, as most people understand them, form in violence.…