Researchers have discovered a highly reactive chemical that they have long believed was too unstable to be used continuously under atmospheric conditions. It is - Dihydrogen trioxide .
A new study shows that millions of tons of extreme reactive chemicals called dihydrogen trioxide can stay in the atmosphere for hours, which may have an impact on human health and the global climate.
These chemicals interact very quickly with other compounds, and their presence means chemists will have to rethink how processes in the atmosphere occur.
For a long time, it has been believed that dihydrogen trioxide -- compounds containing one hydrogen atom and three oxygen atoms are too unstable and cannot last for a long time under atmospheric conditions.
Chemicals interact very quickly with other compounds, and their presence means chemists will have to rethink how the processes in the atmosphere occur.
But new research shows that dihydrogen trioxide is a conventional product of many common chemical reactions, and that they can maintain sufficient stability to react with other compounds in the atmosphere. The free jet setting of
TROPOS allows the study of oxidation reactions under atmospheric conditions, revealing the presence of highly reactive dihydrogen trioxide
strong oxidant
is a kind of polyhydrogen oxide. Water is the simplest and most common hydrogen oxide, with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom , i.e. H2O.
Another polyhydrogen polyoxide is hydrogen peroxide , which has two oxygen atoms—H2O2—usually used as bleach or disinfectant. Additional oxygen atoms also make many peroxide extremely flammable, which are sometimes used as components of rocket fuel.
Dihydrogen trioxide is a further stage because they have three interconnected oxygen atoms, which makes them more reactive than peroxides. They are chemically written as ROOOH, where R is any bonding group, such as the carbon group.
However, although peroxides are known to be formed by chemical reactions in the atmosphere, it has not been known before that dihydrogen trioxide can also be formed in the atmosphere, although the time before they decompose into less reactive chemicals is relatively short.
In this new study, researchers estimate that approximately 111 million tons of (10 million metric tons) of dihydrogen trioxide is formed in the atmosphere as one of the most common reactions: the oxidation of isoprene, a substance produced by many plants and animals, and is the main component of natural rubber.
Researchers estimate that about isoprene released into the atmosphere, which forms dihydrogen trioxide , and they are produced by these reactions at very low concentrations—about 0 million dihydrogen trioxide molecules in the atmosphere of cubic centimeters, which is just a very weak trace.
"We are very happy to prove that [hydrogen trioxide] is there, and that they live long enough that—most likely—is important in the atmosphere,” the study's lead author Torsten Berndt at the Leipzig Institute for Trophos (TROPOS) in Leipzig, Germany, told Live in an email.
Atmospheric Experiment
Berndt led TROPOS's research laboratory experiments to find out whether dihydrogen trioxide is actually produced by chemical reactions in the atmosphere, and The team at the University of Copenhagen studied the theoretical aspects of how dihydrogen trioxide was formed.
Berndt and his colleagues used the very sensitive mass spectrometry to detect hyperreactive dihydrogen trioxide—a technique that can determine the molecular weight of chemicals to find out the atoms they make up for.
The reaction to manufacture dihydrogen trioxide occurs in the TROPOS free jet system, thereby producing airflow that is not hindered by solid boundaries. The study also used experimental results from the Atmosphere Room of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
Now that their research has confirmed that dihydrogen trioxide is formed by common chemical reactions in the atmosphere, Birnter said scientists will next study how these compounds affect human health and the environment within minutes or hours before decomposition.
He said: "Based on organic chemistry knowledge, we can expect [ dihydrogen trioxide ] to act as an oxidant in the atmosphere." It's also possible that nitrous trioxide will have an impact when our lungs inhale air containing very low concentrations, "but at the moment it's all very speculative."
Burnter said that dihydrogen trioxide may also penetrate into the aerosol in the atmosphere. — Very fine solid particles or droplets suspended in the atmosphere, such as ash from a volcanic eruption or soot from a fire—they may trigger chemical reactions there. But “the experimental research on this is very challenging,” he said. "A lot of things to do."
#Telebrity Creation Challenge#
