Diamond rain could fall on many exoplanets
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The sky of an icy planet in space may be full of diamonds. Compacted carbon compounds may turn into diamonds at less extreme temperatures than researchers thought would be necessary, which could make diamond rain a common phenomenon inside giant ice cubes. there is.
In the past, laboratory experiments have confused the conditions under which diamonds form inside ice giants like Uranus and Neptune. There are two types of experiments to investigate this: dynamic compression experiments, in which a carbon compound is subjected to a sudden impact, and static compression experiments, in which it is placed in a chamber and gradually compressed. Previous dynamic compression experiments required much higher temperatures and pressures to form diamonds.
mango frost Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California used static compression and dynamic heating to compress polystyrene, the same polymer used to make Styrofoam, between two diamonds. They conducted a new series of experiments in which they compressed the material by applying an X-pulse. Ray of light. They observed diamonds begin to form from polystyrene at temperatures of about 2,200 degrees Celsius and pressures of about 19 gigapascals, conditions similar to the shallow interiors of Uranus and Neptune.
These pressures are much lower than those found necessary for diamond formation in previous experiments using dynamic compression. This reaction took longer than the typically performed dynamic compaction experiments. This may explain why no low-pressure diamond formation was detected in such experiments. “It didn’t match the established results and wasn’t what we expected, but it was a good fit and brought everything together,” Frost says. “It turns out it’s all due to different timescales.”
This could mean that diamonds could rain on smaller planets than previously thought. The researchers calculated that of the approximately 5,600 exoplanets identified, more than 1,900 could rain diamonds.
This also means that diamonds may form at shallower depths within our solar system than we think, which could change our understanding of the internal dynamics of giant planets. There is a possibility that it will change. This shallow geological formation could allow diamond rain to pass through layers of ice as it sinks toward the centers of these planets. This, in turn, will affect the icy world’s magnetic fields, which are complex and poorly understood.
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