Incredible nano footage shows hydrogen and oxygen fusing to form a molecule of water

In the 2015 movie “The Martian,” when Matt Damon, playing an astronaut stranded on Mars extracts water by burning leftover rocket fuel and adding oxygen. In a recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Northwestern University used a similar method to create water using the rare metallic element, palladium as the catalyst.

They witnessed the ethereal reaction that produced tiny, nano-sized bubbles of water. The breathtaking footage of this chemical reaction was published on YouTube. The breakthrough was achieved while researchers were busy investigating the properties of palladium and how it generates water. Researchers have known since the early 1900s that palladium can react with gases to generate water, but achieving the reaction was a mystery. So, when they witnessed the little water bubbles popping out, it was nothing less than astonishing. The study was led by Vinayak Dravid, lead researcher and Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and founding director of the Northwestern University Atomic and Nanoscale Characterization Experimental (NUANCE) Center.

“It’s a known phenomenon, but it was never fully understood,” said Yukun Liu, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. candidate in Dravid’s laboratory. In a university press release, Liu added, “Because you really need to be able to combine the direct visualization of water generation and the structure analysis at the atomic scale in order to figure out what’s happening.”

The footage in question displays a hydrogen atom making its way inside the palladium molecule. Since hydrogen atoms are so small, they can easily squeeze themselves inside the palladium molecule, causing its lattice to expand, and soon a tiny little water bubble pops out in an unreal manner. “We think it might be the smallest bubble ever formed that has been viewed directly,” Liu said. “It’s not what we were expecting. Luckily, we were recording it, so we could prove to other people that we weren’t crazy.”

Witnessing this reaction in real-time was next to impossible until January 2024 when Dravid’s team published another study, revealing a groundbreaking method to capture gas molecules. The team crafted an ultra-thin glassy membrane that could hold gas molecules in honeycomb-shaped nonreactors, from where they viewed these through high-vacuum transmission electron microscopes. They used the same electron microscope method to capture the footage of this palladium molecule. IFL Science explains that this method is similar to the one that India’s Chandrayaan-1 used to detect water on the Moon.

Researchers also noted in the study that the hydrogen oxidation rate catalyzed by palladium is significantly affected by the sequence in which the gases are introduced. They added, “These nanoscale insights help identify the optimal reaction conditions for Pd-catalyzed hydrogen oxidation, which has substantial implications for water production technologies. The developed understanding also advocates a broader exploration of analogous mechanisms in other metal-catalyzed reactions.” If water can indeed be generated by palladium, then astronauts on space missions would be able to create water in space outside Earth, and probably in the realms beyond.