This was probably my favorite story last week...⠀ ⠀ This story dives down into the mantles of rocky super-Earths. The work was published in Nature, and it involved lasers. No, seriously, lasers were involved. Big, powerful lasers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were used to compress iron oxide to pressures between three and five times that of the core-mantle boundary here on Earth. The compression took nanoseconds. Nanoseconds!⠀ ⠀ Read the full article: buff.ly/396slz2⠀ ⠀ IMAGE: The way that planetary materials behave under pressure influences planets’ interior structure. CREDIT: iStock.com / Rost-9D⠀ ⠀ #planetaryscience #exoplanets #laser #giantlaser #nature #llnl #science #space #astrophysics #superearth #mantle