Hamburg  - Transparent aluminium, as strong as metal yet as clear as glass, is a scientific reality and not just a plot device in an old "Star Trek" movie, according to a team of German researchers.

In the 1986 movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," Scotty travels back in time to show a Silicon Valley engineer how to make "transparent aluminium." In so doing, the intrepid crew of the USS Enterprise are able to save the humpback whale from extinction whilst also saving the Earth of the 23rd century.

When accused of altering the time-flow continuum, Scotty nonchalantly answers, "How do we know he's not the laddie who invented the stuff?"

In fact, a team of German scientists in Hamburg say they may have stumbled onto the discovery of transparent aluminium, according to a report in the scientific journal Nature Physics.

German researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg baked a piece of aluminium foil with a 10-million-gigawatt X-ray laser. They heated the foil so hot that it became a new matter state: transparent aluminium.

These are the same temperatures which exist in the core of giant planets, such as Jupiter.

In this state, X-ray photons can pass through metal, instead of being stopped. That makes the metal "transparent." For now, such conditions can only last for a fraction of a nanosecond before burning up and is attained by using the laser beam to knock an electron out of each aluminium ion, forcing the element to reconfigure into a new, tighter state.

But for an instant, the German researchers can create a new state of matter that is as dense as ordinary solid matter, but extremely hot - and totally transparent.

But rather than trying to save the whales to combat an alien space probe in the 23rd century, the Earth-bound scientists say they plan to use their discovery to uncover the secrets of the centre of Jupiter and other giant planets. (dpa)