REAL LIFE NEWS: WHY URANUS AND NEPTUNE HAVE DIAMOND RAIN
by Hazed
Diamond rain sounds like the title of a pop song … or maybe the name of a Bond girl! But it’s also what happens on the icy outer planets of the Solar System – and now scientists have shown how it could happen.
On Uranus and Neptune, the frigid, high-pressure atmosphere causes hydrogen and carbon atoms to bond, creating nanometre-wide “diamonds” that rain onto the planet’s surface.
Researchers from Stanford’s National Accelerator Laboratory used an optical laser to simulate conditions deep within the gas giants’ atmospheres. They blasted polystyrene plastic, which has a chemical makeup similar to the atmosphere found on the outer planets. This created shockwaves that briefly formed minute crystals of diamond, just a few nanometres wide.
“Previously, researchers could only assume that the diamonds had formed,” said Dominik Kraus, who is the lead author of the report and a scientist from Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany.
The experiment shows that the high pressure of the planets’ methane atmosphere, combined with its structure, could create the tiny diamonds at depths of around 5,000 km into the atmosphere. The crystals would then slowly fall through the gasses and settle around the core of the planets.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/21/how_diamonds_got_in_uranus/
