The planet's core could be a mushy mix of solid and liquid.
But scientists weren’t sure what this mush consisted of. Accessing the core by probe is impossible, so for the new study, the researchers turned instead to a simulation — compiling seismic data and feeding it into an advanced computer program designed to recreate the effects of the core's extreme pressures and temperatures on an assortment of likely core elements: such as iron, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.
"It is quite abnormal," study first author Yu He, a geophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ."The solidification of iron at the inner core boundary does not change the mobility of these light elements, and the convection of light elements is continuous in the inner core," If the simulation lines up with reality, the constant swilling of the mushy superionic materials could help to explain why the inner core's structure seems to change so much over time, and even how the powerful convection currents responsible for creating "We will have to wait until the experimental setting becomes ripe to replicate the inner core conditions and scrutinise the proposed models.