HOW can ice possibly melt in the extreme cold of -180 °C? The answer is if the ice crystals contain just 48 water molecules.
Bernd von Issendorff at the in Germany and his colleagues created ice clusters of just a few tens of water molecules, tagged with an extra electron. The electron’s charge allowed the team to trap the clusters in electric fields and weed out those of the wrong size.
As the ice clusters were ten thousand times smaller than a grain of sand, the researchers couldn’t merely watch them melt. Instead, at temperatures ranging from…
