So if water is detected in the plume, it will have to have come from vaporised ice crystals.

ECONOMIST: Creative destruction

This will produce a new atmosphere, which will consist not of oxygen and nitrogen but of vaporised rock.

ECONOMIST: To the ends of the earth

The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

BBC: Ding dong merrily online

The exhaust gases are at several hundred degrees, and so the water is instantly vaporised, producing huge clouds of steam.

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For another, the artificial fireballs seem to be glowing because of the excitation of the atoms within the vaporised material rather than because of oxidation.

ECONOMIST: Ball lightning

And as the decayed material has an extremely high water content Mr Hansen said that most of the laser's energy is absorbed by the infected tissue, which is then vaporised.

BBC: 'No need for dentist's drill'

Mercury is known as a "volatile" - meaning it is easily vaporised - and is thought to be present in cold, permanently shadowed craters on the Moon (and perhaps other bodies).

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Apophis is some 350 metres across, considerably larger than the object that is thought to have flattened 2, 000 square kilometres of Siberian forest as it vaporised in the atmosphere above Tunguska in 1908.

ECONOMIST: Private efforts to avert disaster in space