By Beth Mole
Lights, camera, kaboom! With snapshots from a high-speed camera, chemists can finally explain why sodium and other alkali metals blow up in water.
Just before the explosion, spikes burst from the metal’s smooth surface, setting off a chain reaction that ignites the metal. The blast’s film debut, appearing online January 26 in Nature Chemistry, offers a long-awaited explanation of a classic chemical reaction demonstrated in classrooms worldwide.
“What we found out is that there’s a crucial piece of the puzzle that precedes the explosion,” says computational chemist Pavel Jungwirth of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague.