14 DAY TRIAL // The chemical substance that we commonly call water presents some of the longest lists of substance anomalies known to man, amongst which most of them are widely a mystery to most people, such as phase, density, material, thermodynamic and physical anomalies. For example, water as a gas is the lightest known, as a liquid it presents a higher density than expected, while when in solid phase it is lighter than expected; when heated it shrinks and when cooled it expands.
Now, as most people probably know, the stable form of water has the chemical composition formed of one oxygen atom and two hydrogens. The hydrogen atoms bond to one side of the oxygen atom, giving the molecule a positive charge, while the other side is charged negative. Due to this configuration, water molecules tend to attract each other and form molecular chains of water, or water drops.
However, while exploring some of the strange behavior that water presents, in the 1960, scientists observed the so-called 'hydrated electrons' phenomena, which involved the formation of a congregate of water molecules around one free electron. The scientific community now mostly agrees that this water cell trapping the free electron consists of six water molecules, all presenting a formation with one hydrogen atom pointing toward the inward direction of the structure. Nevertheless, the process that triggers the formation of this structure mostly remains a mystery, even today.
In the hope that they would finally find an answer to the four-decade mystery, scientists from the Berkeley Advanced Light Source and MAX-Lab, in Sweden, decided to design an experiment that would determine how long the trapped electron remains inside the structure, before it can escape and be captured by another group of molecules.
By using X-ray light to pump energy into the oxygen atoms in the water, scientists were able to extract one electron that was quickly being captured by the surrounding molecules, then it escaped after about 20 femtoseconds, before being captured again by another group. According to the scientists, though it seems like a short time for this to happen, it is just enough so that the rapidly vibrating water molecules would trap it.
Nevertheless, though they have been successful at finding out the necessary time for this process to take place, they still haven't been able to address the problem of how and why this is happening. Scientists say that the next step is to find out the time it takes for the surrounding molecules to actually capture the free electron, which could result in a model of how water behaves at molecular levels. Most of the anomalies associated to water usually have separate explanations, and unifying all these separate theories could result in a model that would account for the strange behavior of water.