The skies of icy planets throughout the cosmos could also be filled with diamonds. Compressed carbon compounds can flip into diamonds at much less excessive temperatures than researchers thought have been required, which can make diamond rain a standard phenomenon inside ice giants.

Previously, laboratory experiments have led to confusion in regards to the situations beneath which diamonds might kind inside ice giants corresponding to Uranus and Neptune. There are two sorts of experiments investigating this: dynamic compression experiments, by which carbon compounds are subjected to a sudden shock, and static compression experiments, by which they’re positioned inside a chamber and compressed step by step. To date, dynamic compression experiments have required a lot larger temperatures and pressures to kind diamonds.

Mungo Frost on the SLAC Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory in California and his colleagues carried out a brand new set of experiments utilizing static compression however dynamic heating, compressing polystyrene – the identical polymer used to make Styrofoam – by squeezing it between two diamonds after which hitting it with pulses of X-ray mild. They noticed diamonds starting to kind from the polystyrene at temperatures of about 2200°C and pressures round 19 gigapascals, situations much like these within the shallow interiors of Uranus and Neptune.

These pressures are a lot decrease than the pressures discovered to be needed for diamond formation in earlier experiments utilizing dynamic compression. The response took longer than dynamic compression experiments usually run, which could clarify why such experiments haven’t picked up low-pressure diamond formation. “It disagreed with established outcomes and wasn’t what we anticipated to see, but it surely slot in properly and kind of tied every little thing collectively,” says Frost. “It seems that was all all the way down to totally different timescales.”

This might imply that diamond rain is feasible on smaller planets than we beforehand thought. Of the 5600 or so confirmed exoplanets, the researchers calculated that greater than 1900 might have diamond rain.

It additionally implies that inside the photo voltaic system, diamonds might kind at shallower depths than we thought, which might change our understanding of the dynamics of the interiors of big planets. This shallower formation might permit the diamond rain to move via a layer of ice because it sinks in the direction of the centres of those planets. This may, in flip, have an effect on the icy worlds’ magnetic fields, that are advanced and poorly understood.