The diamond rain effect is thought to occur deep within ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.
The universe is stranger than you can imagine, and out in the depths of space, there are wild and weird exoplanets to be found — planets with glowing rivers of lava, or planets under gravitational forces so strong they are shaped like a football. We can add to this list another class of strange planet, ones on which it rains diamonds.
The international group of researchers working with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory previously created the diamond rain effect by placing hydrogen and carbon under extremely high pressures. But in this new research, they wanted to make the conditions more realistic to what the interior of an ice giant planet would be like by also including other elements that would be present, such as oxygen.
The researchers used a high-powered laser to create shock waves in the plastic, then observed how X-rays bounced off it. This let them see how small diamonds were forming. The diamonds produced in the experiment were very small, called nanodiamonds, but at around 5,000 miles beneath the surface of an ice giant much larger diamonds could form, where they would fall toward the planet’s icy core. The diamonds could even sink into the core and form a thick diamond layer.
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