While such ice giants used to be thought of as rarities, it now seems clear that they are probably the most common form of planet outside the solar system. The findings are probably not just relevant to Uranus and Neptune, but to innumerable other planets in our galaxy as well. This further supports the assumption that it literally rains diamonds inside the ice giants. “It meant the carbon atoms could combine more easily and form diamonds.” “The effect of the oxygen was to accelerate the splitting of the carbon and hydrogen and thus encourage the formation of nanodiamonds,” Kraus added. They used it to analyse what happens when intensive laser flashes hit a PET film, employing two measurement methods at the same time: X-ray diffraction to determine whether nanodiamonds were produced and so-called small-angle scattering to see how quickly and how large the diamonds grew. The team conducted its experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, the location of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful, accelerator-based X-ray laser. “PET has a good balance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate the activity in ice planets,” Kraus said. When searching for suitable film material, the group hit on an everyday substance: PET, the resin out of which ordinary plastic bottles are made. Using these films, however, it was only partially possible to simulate the interior of planets, because ice giants not only contain carbon and hydrogen but also vast amounts of oxygen. “We discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds, known as nanodiamonds.” “Up to now, we used hydrocarbon films for these kinds of experiment,” explained Dominik Kraus, physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock. Nonetheless, states like this can be simulated briefly in the lab: powerful laser flashes hit a film-like material sample, heat it up to 6,000☌ for the blink of an eye and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure. The conditions in the interior of icy giant planets such as Neptune and Uranus are extreme: temperatures reach several thousand degrees Celsius and the pressure is millions of times greater than in the Earth’s atmosphere. The group has presented its findings in the journal Science Advances. This method could establish a new way of producing nanodiamonds, which are needed, for example, for highly-sensitive quantum sensors. One result was that the researchers were able to confirm that it really does 'rain diamonds' inside the ice giants at the periphery of our solar system. The researchers fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. An international team, headed by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostock and France’s École Polytechnique, conducted a novel experiment to determine what goes on inside ice planets such as Neptune and Uranus.
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