Beautiful video shows a soap bubble freezing in less than 30 seconds on an 18 ° F (-28 ° C) morning in Winnipeg, Canada.
The relaxing images show the bubble shaking slightly in the wind before it begins to form star-shaped ice crystals, like pieces of tin foil carved all over its surface.
These crystals grow until the perfectly spherical bubble solidifies completely, forming what looks like a calm ice planet in a distant galaxy.
It was captured and posted on YouTube and Twitter by Heather Hinam, an artist, photographer and wildlife enthusiast from Canada.
“Cold, clear days with very little wind are great for freezing bubbles,” Hinam wrote on Twitter.
“This morning, -28 ° C left me in the backyard with a good camera, bubble solution and tripod.
“Here’s a frozen zen moment for your afternoon.”
In the video, Hinam uses a transparent tube soaked in a special solution, consisting of hot water, washing liquid, corn syrup and sugar.
“From what I understand, sugar and corn syrup adds a little structure to the balloon so that it doesn’t appear as cold in the cold,” Hinam told MailOnline.
“They still appear very easily and it usually takes a few tries before I get one that is stable enough to freeze.
“I didn’t just try to freeze the bubbles with soap and water, but I felt it would be harder to keep them intact long enough to freeze.”
The footage shows Hinam blowing through the tube and with the bubble forming easily and swaying in the morning wind.
After only five seconds from the formation of the bubble, small white tips begin to appear on different parts of its surface.
These pins grow larger and larger, forming a variety of jagged crystals and elaborate patterns, which eventually come together to form a complete ice sphere.
The dynamics of frozen soap bubbles were widely explored by experts in the 2019 study in Nature Communications. Here, beautiful star-shaped ice crystals form over the bubbles, like intricately carved pieces of tin foil.
“There’s not enough life on this ice cube to fill a space cruiser”: The balloon eventually solidifies to form what looks like an ice planet in a galaxy far, far away
This beautiful phenomenon is known as the “snow globe effect” and was detailed in a scientific paper published in the journal Nature Communications in 2019.
“Drops or puddles tend to freeze from the spread of a single front of frost,” writes the newspaper, written by researchers at Virginia Tech.
“In contrast, videographers have shown that as soap bubbles freeze, a growing multitude of ice crystals can spin into a beautiful effect that is visually reminiscent of a snow globe.”
The study’s author, Jonathan Boreyko, and colleagues investigated the heat transfer processes that govern the dynamics of soap bubble freezing.
The authors placed bubbles on a frozen surface with the camera at two different temperature conditions and filmed the separate freezing processes.
When the bubble was deposited on an ice substrate in a freezer and the ambient air was at the same temperature as the bubble, the effect of the snow globe was observed, as was that of Hinam.
The image from the 2019 study shows the dynamics of bubble freezing in different environmental conditions. a) bubbles deposited on an ice substrate contained in a freezer, the frost front induced local heating at the bottom of the bubble. This led to a Marangoni flow and the freezing of the bubble on several fronts. b) For bubbles deposited on a cool substrate and frozen in a room temperature environment, the frost front increased from bottom to top evenly before stopping completely at a critical height.
Scientists have described how it was the result of a phenomenon known as the Marangoni flow, which sees a liquid flowing from areas with low surface tension to areas with high surface tension, causing ice crystals to detach and rotate independently. .
Eventually, the entire bubble freezes as the crystalline aggregates.
Meanwhile, for bubbles deposited on a cooled and frozen substrate at room temperature, the ice rose from the bottom up evenly.
The bubble froze from the coldest point – where the bubble was in contact with the frozen surface – and slowly rose upwards.
This process was stopped in the middle of the balloon due to poor driving and eventually collapsed when it could no longer be sustained.
“The frost front is slowly spreading upwards and stopping completely at a critical height,” the team reported.