- A group of researchers has recreated the temperatures and pressures of the depths of Neptune and Uranus.
rain of diamonds
There is more rain of diamonds in giant worlds than thought
A new study has found that 'diamond rain', a type of hypothetical exotic precipitation on ice giant planets, could be more common than previously thought.
In a previous experiment, the researchers mimicked the extreme temperatures and pressures found deep within the ice giants Neptune and Uranus and, for the first time, observed this phenomenon as it formed.
Investigating this process in a new material that more closely resembles the chemical makeup of Neptune and Uranus, scientists at the US Department of State's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their colleagues found that the presence of oxygen makes diamond formation more difficult. more likely, allowing them to form and grow in a wider range of conditions and on more planets.
The new study provides a more complete picture of how this phenomenon plays out on other planets and, here on Earth, could lead to a new way to make nanodiamonds, which have a wide range of applications in drug delivery, medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics.
"The paper above was the first time we directly saw diamond formation from any mixture," says Siegfried Glenzer, director of the High Energy Density Division at SLAC, in a statement. "Since then, there have been quite a few experiments with different pure materials, but, inside planets, it's much more complicated. There are many more chemicals in the mix. So what we wanted to find out here was what kind of effect these additional chemicals have. ", Add.
The team, led by Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Rostock in Germany, as well as France's École Polytechnique in collaboration with SLAC, published the results in Science Advances.
Various chemical components
In the previous experiment, the researchers studied a plastic material made from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon, key components of the overall chemical composition of Neptune and Uranus. However, the ice giants contain other elements, such as large amounts of oxygen.
In the latest experiment, the researchers used PET plastic, often used in food packaging, plastic bottles, and containers, to reproduce the composition of these planets more accurately.
"PET has a good balance between carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to simulate activity on ice planets," says Dominik Kraus, a physicist at HZDR and a professor at the University of Rostock.
The researchers used a high-power optical laser in the Matter in Extreme Conditions (MEC) instrument at SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to create shock waves in the PET. Then they tested what happened to the plastic with pulses of X-rays from LCLS.
Combination of several techniques
Using a method called X-ray diffraction, they observed how the material's atoms rearranged themselves into tiny diamond-like regions. At the same time, they used another technique called small-angle scattering, which had not been used in the first paper, to measure how fast and how large those regions were growing.
Using small-angle scattering, they were able to determine that these diamond regions grew to a few nanometers across. They found that, with the presence of oxygen in the material, the nanodiamonds could grow at lower pressures and temperatures than previously observed.
"The effect of oxygen was to speed up the splitting of carbon and hydrogen and thus promote the formation of nanodiamonds," says Kraus. "It meant that carbon atoms could combine more easily and form diamonds," he adds.
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