American scientists have managed to recreate the “diamond rain” occurring on Neptune and Uranus. The study was conducted at SLAC National accelerator laboratory (USA), reports Popular Mechanics.
With the knowledge that the planets atmosphere consists mainly of hydrogen, helium and methane, experts have tried to recreate similar conditions in the laboratory. The researchers used x-ray laser, instead they took methane hydrocarbon polystyrene. The latter material was heated to 4,700 thousand degrees and placed under a pressure of about half a million bar. According to experts, it is equivalent to a pressure of 250 African elephants on the surface of the nail.
As a result of experiments it turned out a chemical reaction with the cleavage of carbon — carbon crystallized in the diamond, while the hydrogen is gone. According to the researchers, the experiment reveals the reason why the core of Neptune generates a huge amount of energy — approximately two times more than it receives from the Sun. Scientists came to the conclusion that enormous amounts of energy to produce clusters of diamonds.
“the Understanding of these processes will be more relevant with the discovery of new exoplanets,” said participated in the research scientist Dominik Kraus (Kraus Dominic).
Experiments with the “diamond rain” began in 2017, but the first tests were not given clarity.
