A new study says that it is possible that some planets are able to form rivers of diamonds.
The study used a simple form of plastic to recreate the conditions that supposedly led to the presence of diamonds in the cores of the planets Uranus and Neptune.
Scientists hypothesized that enormous pressures transform hydrogen and carbon into diamonds, flowing thousands of kilometers below the gaseous surfaces of the two icy giants.
The study published in the journal “Science Advances” indicated that the friction of oxygen with this mixture facilitates the formation of diamonds.
Dominic Krause, a physicist from the German research laboratory “HZDR” and one of the authors of the study, explained that these rivers are probably of a very special type.
Krauss told AFP that diamonds are likely formed from a hot and dense liquid, before slowly flowing towards the rocky region in the middle of the two planets, at a depth of 10,000 kilometers below their surface, and then spreading the liquid in layers at a distance of hundreds of kilometers or more.
Scientists from the laboratory “HZDR”, the University of “Rostock” in Germany and “Ecole Polytechnic” of France are trying to recreate the conditions in which diamond rivers form.
They used a simple type of plastic that plays a role in mixing the necessary components to form diamonds, which are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and this type of plastic is the same used in the manufacture of soft drink bottles. Then they exposed it to heat by using a powerful laser in the Slack Laboratory in Stanford, USA. Krause pointed out that the nano-diamonds that formed were seen through very simple X-rays, but with an amazing density, and it is so small that it is impossible to see with the naked eye.