Icy hot plasmas: Fluffy, electrically charged ice grains reveal new plasma dynamics

When a gas is highly energized, its electrons get torn from the parent atoms, resulting in a plasma-the oft-forgotten fourth state of matter (along with solid, liquid, and gas). When we think of plasmas, we normally think of extremely hot phenomena such as the sun, lightning, or maybe arc welding, but there are situations in which icy cold particles are associated with plasmas. Images of distant molecular clouds from the James Webb Space Telescope feature such hot-cold interactions, with frozen ...