PARIS (AFP) – Scientists think that it might be raining diamonds on planets all over the universe. On Friday, they used ordinary plastic to make the strange rain they think forms deep inside Uranus and Neptune.
Scientists had thought that thousands of kilometres below the surface of the ice giants, where there is a lot of pressure and heat, hydrogen and carbon turn into solid diamonds.
Now, a study that was published in Science Advances added oxygen to the mix and found that “diamond rain” might happen more often than people thought.
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Ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are thought to be the most common type of planet outside of our Solar System. This means that diamond rain could happen anywhere in the universe.
Dominik Kraus, a physicist at Germany’s HZDR research lab and one of the study’s authors, said that diamond precipitation was very different from rain on Earth.
He said that he thinks there is a “hot, dense liquid” under the surface of the planets. This is where diamonds form and slowly sink to the rocky, possibly Earth-sized cores more than 10,000 km (6,200 miles) below.
Kraus told AFP that the layers of fallen diamonds could be “hundreds or even thousands of kilometres” long.
He said that even though these diamonds might not be shiny and cut like “a nice gem on a ring,” they were made by the same forces that make diamonds on Earth.
In order to figure out how to do it again, the research team found the right mix of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in a material that is easy to get: PET plastic, which is used to package food and make bottles.
Kraus said that even though the scientists used very clean PET plastic, “the experiment should work with Coca-Cola bottles in theory.”
The team then used a powerful optical laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California to look at the plastic.
Kraus said that “very, very short X-ray flashes of incredible brightness” let them watch the formation of nanodiamonds, which are tiny diamonds that are too small to see with the naked eye.
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“The large amounts of oxygen on those planets help pull the hydrogen atoms away from the carbon, making it easier for those diamonds to form,” he said.
How to make nanodiamonds in a new way
The experiment could lead to a new way to make nanodiamonds, which are used for a growing number of things like drug delivery, medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, and quantum electronics.
“At the moment, nanodiamonds are made by blowing up a bunch of carbon or diamond with explosives,” said Benjamin Ofori-Okai, a scientist at SLAC and co-author of the study.
“Laser production could offer a way to make nanodiamonds that is cleaner and easier to control,” he said.
The diamond rain research is still just a guess because we don’t know much about Uranus and Neptune, which are the farthest planets from the Sun.
The only spacecraft to fly by the two ice giants was NASA’s Voyager 2 in the 1980s. The data it sent back is still being used in research.
But a NASA group has come up with a plan for a new mission to the planets that could start as soon as the next 10 years.
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Kraus said, “That would be great.”
He said that he can’t wait to get more information, even if it takes a decade or two.
