Metallic hydrogen, a bizarre form of the element that conducts electricity even at low temperatures, has finally been made in the lab, 80 years after physicists predicted its existence. Scientists managed to create the elusive, electrically conductive hydrogen by squeezing it to incredibly high pressures between two ultra pure diamonds, the researchers reported in a new study.

"No one has ever encountered metallic hydrogen because it's never existed on Earth before," Isaac Silvera, a condensed matter physicist at Harvard University, told Live Science. "Probably the conditions in the universe are such that it has never existed in the universe." In theory, it's possible that metallic hydrogen could be used as an ultralight, extremely powerful rocket fuel, Silvera added.

In 1935, physicists Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington predicted that high pressures of around 25 giga pascals (about 246,000 times atmospheric pressure) could force the normal bonds between solid hydrogen atoms to break down, freeing electrons to move around. In simple terms, the normally transparent material would become shiny and reflective, and have other properties associated with metals. (Technically, the definition of a metal is that it conducts a finite amount of electricity even as you cool it toward the lowest possible temperature, absolute zero, Silvera said.)

If the metallic hydrogen maintains its properties even after the high pressure is removed, it's possible it could be used to make a room-temperature superconductor, Silvera said. This could be helpful in producing magnetic-levitating trains or MRI machines that do not require the material to be cooled to liquid helium temperature atures."It's also predicted to be the most powerful rocket propellant that man knows, So, if one could somehow scale it up and make large quantities of it, it could revolutionize rocketry," Silvera said. Basically, because it takes so much energy to squish hydrogen into its metallic state, when they recombine into their molecular form (two hydrogen atoms bonded together), they release huge amounts of heat. And because hydrogen is the lightest element, it would be tens of times lighter than existing rocket propellants. The team wants to follow up on these results by testing whether metallic hydrogen is stable and superconducting at normal temperatures and pressures.
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so hydrogen now exist as an isotope element.science advances simultaneously.

newyorks:
so hydrogen now exist as an isotope element.science advances simultaneously.

Hydrogen always had an isotope called deutrium and titrium but this is a metallic form quite different from the natural isotope