Giant Ice Planets Throughout the Galaxy May Be Raining Diamonds
Researchers say insights on giant planets could boost nanodiamond production on Earth.
Eric Mack
Sept. 3, 2022 8:46 p.m. PT
2 min read
Diamond rain might be a common form of precipitation in the galaxy.
SLAC
Experiments on Earth indicate an abundance of diamonds literally raining down on icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus and may even point toward a new way to produce tiny nanodiamonds for use on our own planet.
Earlier research has suggested actual diamonds may be present in rain and hail in the atmospheres of giant planets, including Saturn, but a new international collaboration finds that diamond rain could be relatively common throughout the galaxy.
Researchers from Germany, France and the US tweaked the previous experiments, using a new material that's more similar to the chemistry found on ice giants. This mystery material turns out to not be exotic at all, but a kind of PET plastic typically used in bottles you can buy at the store. The more representative chemical mix in the plastic basically added levels of oxygen that hadn't been present in the earlier experiments.
Using the plastic as a stand-in for the chemistry of an ice giant's atmosphere, they then zapped it with a laser to simulate the atmospheric pressures present on such planets to see what would happen.
More:
https://www.cnet.com/science/giant-ice-planets-throughout-the-galaxy-may-be-raining-diamonds/
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... this could explain why Dr. Smith stowed away on the Jupiter 2...
