A strange and interesting phenomenon occurs in the depths of the planets of my heart Neptune and Uranus, where these depths can rain diamonds, and scientists have come up with new experimental evidence that shows how this can happen.
Mating and separation mechanisms
The hypothesis says that intense heat and pressure - thousands of kilometers below the surface of these ice giants - should decompose hydrocarbons, with carbon being compressed into diamonds and diving deeper into planetary cores.
The new experiment used a X-ray laser from the Coherent Light Source (LCLS) of Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to perform the most accurate measurements to date on how the "diamond rain" process occurred, and found that carbon is directly converted into crystalline diamonds.
"This research provides data on a phenomenon that is very difficult to computerize," explained plasma physicist Mike Dunn, director of LCLS, who is not involved in the study, when susceptibility to mixing, union or separation when mixing.
Ice giants
Both Neptune and Uranus are our most unknown planets in the Solar System. They are very distant planets that only one space probe has approached, Voyager 2, and that was through flight, not a long-term ad hoc mission.
But ice giants are very common in the larger Milky Way galaxy - according to NASA - as Neptune-like exoplanets are ten times more diffuse than Jupiter-like exoplanets.
Thus, understanding the ice giants in our solar system is vital to understanding planets throughout the galaxy. To get to know her better, we need to know what's going on beneath the quiet blue exterior.
We know that the atmosphere of Neptune and Uranus consists mainly of hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane. And beneath these atmospheric layers, a super-dense liquid of "icy" material like water, methane and ammonia wraps around the planet’s core.
Calculations and experiments, dating back decades, have shown that with sufficient pressure and temperature, methane can be broken down into diamonds, indicating that the latter can form inside this hot, dense material.
Deep Neptune simulation
Due to the difficulty in repeating the interior of giant planets here on Earth, it took some intense equipment, and this is what LCLS has provided.
And there was a need for matter to duplicate the things inside that giant planet. For this, the hydrocarbon polystyrene (C8H8) team used instead of methane (CH4).
The first step was to heat the materials and press them to duplicate the conditions inside Neptune at a depth of about 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles).
Where optical laser pulses generate shock waves in polystyrene, which heats the material up to about 5,000 K (4 thousand and 727 ° C) and it also creates intense pressure.
"We produce about 1.5 million bars, which is equivalent to the pressure exerted by the weight of about 250 African villas on the surface of the thumbnail," says German physicist Dominik Kraus, involved in the new study.
Repeatability with other planets
Kraus says the team used a different method from previous studies to measure the extent of X-ray scattering of electrons in polystyrene, and this allowed them to monitor the conversion of carbon to diamonds.
He adds that in the case of ice giants they now know that carbon almost exclusively produces diamonds when they separate, and does not take the form of liquid as a transition.
This is important, because there is something really strange about Neptune, and that is that its interior is hotter than it should be. In fact, it gives 2.6 times more energy than it absorbs from the sun.
If diamonds - which are more dense than the surrounding materials - are raining inside the planet, they may release gravitational energy, which is converted into heat resulting from friction between the diamonds and the materials surrounding them.
With this technique, Kraus believes, they will be able to see how hydrogen and helium mix and separate, and other elements inside gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.