It could be raining diamonds on planets throughout the universe, scientists suggested Friday, after using common plastic to recreate the strange precipitation believed to form deep inside Uranus and Neptune.
September 4, 2022
It could be raining diamonds on planets throughout the universe, scientists suggested Friday, after using common plastic to recreate the strange precipitation believed to form deep inside Uranus and Neptune.
Scientists had previously theorized that extremely high pressure and temperatures turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds thousands of kilometers below the surface of the ice giants.
Now new research, published in Science Advances, inserted oxygen into the mix, finding that „diamond rain“ could be more common than thought.
Ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are thought to be the most common form of planet outside our Solar System, which means diamond rain could be occurring across the universe.
Dominik Kraus, a physicist at Germany’s HZDR research lab and one of the study’s authors, said that diamond precipitation was quite different to rain on Earth.
Under the surface of the planets is believed to be a „hot, dense liquid“, where the diamonds form and slowly sink down to the rocky, potentially Earth-size cores more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) below, he said.
