“Overall, we think there is a picture emerging that is converging on the truth,” Dr. Celliers said.

Liquid metallic hydrogen does not naturally occur on Earth — except possibly at the core. But at Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, most of the hydrogen could be flowing as a liquid metal and generating the planet’s powerful magnetic fields. Understanding the properties of metallic hydrogen could help scientists decipher data from NASA’s Juno mission, currently in orbit around Jupiter.

The data could also sift out which theoretical models work in describing the properties of hydrogen under extreme conditions and which should be discarded.

David M. Ceperley, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his collaborators worked on herculean computer calculations, each data point the result of about 100 hours on a supercomputer with 10,000 computer cores, to model the transition of liquid hydrogen from insulator to metal.

He said the Livermore results agree within about 10 percent of what their findings predicted in 2009, within the uncertainties of the experiment’s measurements.

“For us, they’re great,” Dr. Ceperley said. “They not only end up right on top of our calculations,” but also help reconcile the disparate Harvard and Sandia findings.

The Sandia scientists, however, remain confident in their data and did not agree with how the new paper reinterpreted their findings.

“We have a different interpretation of what they’re seeing,” said Michael P. Desjarlais, a Sandia scientist who worked on that experiment. “Their temperatures are actually higher than they believe. Then their results would actually be quite consistent with ours.”