Some planets could form rivers of diamonds, according to a study published this Friday, which used ordinary plastic to recreate the conditions of their supposed appearance in the depths of Uranus and Neptune.
Scientists assumed that colossal pressures were turning hydrogen and carbon into diamonds, flowing thousands of kilometers below the gaseous surface of these icy giants. The study published in Science Advances suggests that adding oxygen to the mixture would facilitate this formation. The rivers would be of a very particular type, explained Dominik Kraus, a physicist at the German research laboratory HZDR and co-author of the study.
The diamonds would form from a “hot, dense liquid” before gently flowing into the rocky heart of the planets, 10,000 kilometers below the surface, he explained to AFP. They would then spread out in layers “hundreds of kilometers or more”.
Diamonds much larger than those present on Earth
A team of scientists from the HZDR, the German University of Rostock and the École polytechnique attempted to recreate these conditions. He used a simple plastic as a material by mixing the necessary ingredients: carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The same one used in soft drink bottles. Then he subjected it to the fire of a powerful laser from the Stanford SLAC laboratory in the United States.
“Very, very short flashes of X-rays of incredible intensity” allowed the formation of nano-diamonds, too small to be seen with the naked eye, to be observed, described Dominik Kraus.
The supply of oxygen, “present in large quantities on these planets”, would thus facilitate the formation of diamonds, he explained. The researchers speculate that the diamonds there could be much larger than those produced by the Earth experiment, possibly millions of carats, adds a statement published with the study.
This knowledge is applied to the production of nano-diamonds.
This discovery paves the way for a new way to produce nanodiamonds, which are increasingly useful in many applications, such as medical probes, non-invasive surgery, or quantum electronics.
The industrial method of manufacturing nano-diamonds consists of subjecting carbon-rich materials to very strong explosions. “Laser production could offer a cleaner and more easily controllable method of nanodiamonds,” said Benjamin Ofori-Okai, a scientist at SLAC and co-author of the study.
As for what is really happening in the heart of Neptune and Uranus, the most distant planets in the solar system, we will have to wait for future space missions to find out more. To date, only one NASA probe, Voyager 2, has crossed the two icy planets.
Source: BFM TV
