It is possible that some planets able to form rivers from diamondAccording to a study published Friday, it used a simple type of plastic to recreate the conditions that supposedly led to the presence of diamonds in the interior of my planet. Uranus AndNeptune.
Scientists hypothesized that enormous pressures transform hydrogen and carbon into diamonds, flowing thousands of kilometers below the gaseous surfaces of the two icy giants.
The study, published in the journal “Science Advances”, indicated that the friction of oxygen with this mixture facilitates the formation of diamonds. Dominic Krause, a physicist from the German research laboratory HZDR and one of the authors of the study, explained that these rivers are probably of a very special type. He added that diamonds likely formed from a “hot and dense liquid”, before slowly flowing towards the rocky region in the middle of the two planets, at a depth of 10,000 kilometers below their surface, and then spreading in layers “at a distance of hundreds of kilometers or more.”
Scientists from the HZDR Laboratory, Germany’s University of Rostock and France’s École Polytechnique are trying to recreate the conditions under which diamond rivers form.
They used a simple type of plastic that plays a role in mixing the necessary components to form diamonds, which are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and this type of plastic is the same used in the manufacture of soft drink bottles, and then they exposed it to heat through the use of a powerful laser in the Slack Laboratory in Stanford, USA.
Krause pointed out that the nano-diamonds that formed were seen through very simple X-rays, but of amazing density, and it is so small that it is impossible to see with the naked eye.
Oxygen “which is present in large quantities in these two planets” facilitated the formation of diamonds. Scientists believe that the diamonds that form on these two planets may be larger than that of the component in tests carried out on Earth, and their size may be equivalent to millions of carats, according to a statement published with the study.
This discovery paves the way for a new method to produce nanodiamonds, which is increasingly used in many fields, including medical probes, unconventional surgery or quantitative processing techniques.
The industrial method for manufacturing nanodiamonds is to subject carbon-rich materials to very powerful explosions. “Production of nanodiamonds with lasers is a much cleaner and more easily controlled method,” said Benjamin Ofori-Okai, a Slack scientist and one of the study’s authors.
As for diamonds, they are formed on the planets Neptune and Uranus, the two farthest planets in the world Solar System, we will have to wait for future space missions to find out more information about him. So far, only one NASA probe, Voyager 2, has been sent to the two icy planets.
(AFP)