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.
The researchers fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. 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.
This method could establish a new way of producing nanodiamonds, which are needed, for example, for highly-sensitive quantum sensors. The group has presented its findings in the journal Science Advances.
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.
Nonetheless...