It exists outer planets Wild and exotic, they can be found in the depths of space, with glowing rivers of lava or planets under gravitational forces so strong that they are shaped like a football, and to this list we can add another category of exotic planets raining diamonds.
The diamond rain effect is believed to occur deep in ice giants like Uranus and Neptune and was recreated in a lab here on Earth in 2017. Now researchers have discovered that the effect is not just a rare coincidence, but it may be more common. Than previously thought, Digitartlends reported.
An international group of researchers working with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has created the diamond rain effect by placing hydrogen and carbon under extremely high pressure.
But in this new research, they wanted to create more realistic conditions for what the interior of a giant icy planet would be like by including other elements present, such as oxygen.
To simulate this mixture of chemicals, the researchers used a familiar material — PET plastic, like that used in good packaging, which turned out to be chemically similar to the conditions they wanted to make. “PET has a good balance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate activity on icy planets,” explained one of the researchers, Dominic Krause, from the University of Rostock.
The researchers used a high-powered laser to create shock waves in the plastic, then watched to bounce X-rays off it. This allowed them to see what the tiny diamond looked like.
To simulate this mixture of chemicals, the researchers used a familiar material — PET plastic, like that used in good packaging, which turned out to be chemically similar to the conditions they wanted to make.
“PET has a good balance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate activity on icy planets,” explained one of the researchers, Dominic Krause, from the University of Rostock.
The researchers used a high-powered laser to create shock waves in the plastic, then watched to bounce X-rays off it.
This allowed them to see how the tiny diamond was formed. The diamonds produced in the experiment were very small, called nanodiamonds, but regarding 5,000 miles below the surface of the giant glacier, a much larger diamond would have formed when it fell toward the planet. Ice core.. Diamonds can also sink into the core and form a thick layer of diamond.
In the new experiments, the team found that when oxygen was included, nanodiamonds grew at lower temperatures and pressures, which means that the presence of oxygen increases the diamond’s potential for rain.
“The effect of the oxygen was supposed to accelerate the splitting of carbon and hydrogen and thus promote the formation of nanodiamonds,” Krause said. “This means that the carbon atoms can combine more easily to form diamonds.”
With this discovery, the scientists now want to try the experiments once more and include chemicals like ethanol, water and ammonia to more closely model the environment of the ice giants.
“The fact that we can recreate these extreme conditions to see how these processes operate on a very fast and very small scale is exciting,” said SLAC scientist and collaborator Nicholas Hartley. “Adding oxygen brings us closer than ever to seeing the full picture of these planetary processes, but there is still more work to be done. It’s a step toward getting a more realistic mix and seeing how these materials actually behave on other planets.”
