A wibbly wobbly world?

Turns out that neutrons are really good for investigating solid nitrogen. Yup, the stuff that literally makes up the air around us - when it gets cold enough it becomes a jelly-like solid, that can re-arrange when temperatures get even colder. It’s also the most dominant material on the surface of the distant dwarf planet Pluto, and we were able to do some experiments that found out some pretty fundamental information about solid nitrogen and methane.

The paper behind this work can be found here, and there’s plans afoot to investigate more Pluto glacier materials - watch this space!