Researchers at SLAC found that oxygen boosts this exotic precipitation, revealing a new path to make nanodiamonds here on Earth.
A new study has found that “diamond rain,” a long-hypothesized exotic type of precipitation on ice giant planets, could be more common than previously thought.
In an earlier experiment, researchers mimicked the extreme temperatures and pressures found deep inside ice giants Neptune and Uranus and, for the first time, observed diamond rain as it formed.
Investigating this process in a new material that more closely resembles the chemical makeup of Neptune and Uranus, scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their colleagues discovered that the presence of oxygen makes diamond formation more likely, allowing them to form and grow at a wider range of conditions and throughout more planets.
The new study provides a more complete picture of how diamond rain forms on other planets and, here on Earth, could lead to a new way of fabricating nanodiamonds, which have a very wide array of applications in drug delivery, medical sensors, noninvasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics.
“The earlier paper was the first time that we directly saw diamond formation from any mixtures,” said Siegfried Glenzer, director of the High Energy Density Division at SLAC. “Since then, there have been quite a lot of experiments with different pure materials. But inside planets, it’s much more complicated; there are a lot more chemicals in the mix. And so, what we wanted to figure out here was what sort of effect these additional chemicals have.”
The team, led by the 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 today in Science Advances.
Read more on the SLAC website