The researchers predict that diamonds on Neptune and Uranus would become much larger than the nanodiamonds produced in these experiments – maybe millions of carats in weight. “It meant the carbon atoms could combine more easily and form diamonds.” Iced-out planets “The effect of the oxygen was to accelerate the splitting of the carbon and hydrogen and thus encourage the formation of nanodiamonds,” Kraus said. They found that, with the presence of oxygen in the material, the nanodiamonds were able to grow at lower pressures and temperatures than previously observed. Using this additional method, they were able to determine that these diamond regions grew up to a few nanometers wide. They simultaneously used another method called small-angle scattering, which had not been used in the first paper, to measure how fast and large those regions grew. Using a method called X-ray diffraction, they watched as the atoms of the material rearranged into small diamond regions. Then, they probed what happened in the plastic with X-ray pulses from LCLS. The researchers used a high-powered optical laser at the Matter in Extreme Conditions (MEC) instrument at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to create shock waves in the PET. “PET has a good balance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate the activity in ice planets,” said Dominik Kraus, a physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock. In the more recent experiment, the researchers used PET plastic – often used in food packaging, plastic bottles, and containers – to reproduce the composition of these planets more accurately. But in addition to carbon and hydrogen, ice giants contain other elements, such as large amounts of oxygen. In the previous experiment, the researchers studied a plastic material made from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon, key components of the overall chemical composition of Neptune and Uranus. 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. And so, what we wanted to figure out here was what sort of effect these additional chemicals have.” But inside planets, it’s much more complicated there are a lot more chemicals in the mix. “Since then, there have been quite a lot of experiments with different pure materials. “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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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