Regardless of the number of atoms in any particular chemical compound - water, oxygen, methane, helium, etc. - the combination of temperature and pressure conditions determines whether it’s a solid, liquid, or gas. Some atoms bind together to form molecules other atoms exist as standalone entities. Here on Earth, everything is made up of atoms. ( Credit: Matthieumarechal/Wikimedia Commons)
At sufficiently high temperatures, all atom-based matter will become an ionized plasma: the fourth state of matter. In the liquid phase, dropping the pressure significantly can result in a solid (ice) or a gas (water vapor), depending on what the temperature is and how rapidly the transition occurs.
At present, they’re only achievable under extreme laboratory conditions, but they might play an important role in the Universe itself. Turn up the energy high enough, and even protons and neutrons will disintegrate, forming a quark-gluon plasma: arguably the fifth state of matter.īut there are two additional states of matter that not only can exist, but do: Bose-Einstein Condensates and Fermionic Condensates, the sixth and seventh states of matter. If you bombard any atom with enough energy, you’ll kick the electrons off of it, creating an ionized plasma: the fourth state of matter. However, these three common states of matter are all based on neutral atoms restrictions that the Universe is not bound by. All of these occur with regularity here on Earth’s surface: rocks and ices are solids, water and many oils are liquids, while the atmosphere that we breathe is a gas. How many states of matter are there? When you were young, you probably learned about the three that are most common to our experience: solid, liquid, and gas.
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