Thursday, October 10, 2013

Diamonds may fall as rain and form oceans on Saturn and Jupiter

The original article can be found here

Diamonds may fall as rain and form oceans on Saturn and Jupiter

Saturn and Jupiter may be a girl's best friend after scientists have claimed that diamonds may fall from the sky as rain to create large oceans on the giant planets.

Carbon may be crushed and melted to form diamond oceans on Jupiter
Carbon may be crushed and melted to form diamond oceans on Jupiter Photo: AP
Diamonds may fall from the sky on the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.
Astrophysicists have calculated that the conditions on the two biggest planets of the solar system are enough to produce stable oceans made from diamond.
They claim that powerful lightning storms in the planets’ atmospheres cause particles of carbon to form, which then drift down though the gas.
As the carbon falls, it is crushed by the enormous pressures that exist on the two planets, causing them to form dense chunks of diamond.
At even greater depths, the scientists say the diamond will eventually melt to form liquid diamond, which may then form a stable ocean layer.
Dr Kevin Baines, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who conducted the work along with Dr Mona Delitsky, from California speciality Engineering, said: “At the boundaries – locations of sharp increases in density – on Jupiter and Saturn, there may be diamond rain or diamond oceans sitting as a layer
“Previously, only Uranus and Neptune were thought to have conditions in their interiors that would allow the formation of diamond at their cores.”
Dr Baines and Dr Delitsky are due to present their findings to the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.
They used new data from experiments on how diamond changes state at extremely high pressures temperatures.
They calculated the altitude on each planet at which diamond reaches its melting point.
They say that while on Jupiter most of the diamond material will melt to form a liquid, on Saturn there may be chunks of diamond floating around.
They said that it was unlikely that diamonds could form liquid oceans on the other giant gas planets in the solar system - Uranus and Neptune - despite previous research suggesting these did form.
Instead they said these planets were likely to have solid diamond crystals at their core.
Dr Delitsky said: “It appears that the interior of Jupiter gets hot enough to reach the liquid diamond region of the carbon phase diagram, whereas the interior of Saturn includes regions of temperature and pressure where carbon could exist as solid diamond.”
Diamonds are a form of carbon that forms under high pressure where the attoms are arranged in a regular diamond-shaped cyrstal lattice.
On Saturn, it is thought that lightning storms produce carbon by splitting gases like methane into their constituent atoms.
However, for those wanting to find diamonds in even greater quantities, it may be worth looking beyond the boundaries of our own solar system.
Two years ago scientists announced they had found a planet that was five times the size of Earth and composed almost entirely of diamond.
However, there are some suggestions that another planet, 40 light years from Earth, which was thought to have a thick layer of diamond beneath its crust may actually be formed of gas.

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