Planets like Uranus learn how to make nanodiamonds with plastic bottles

Science Book, Sept. 2 (EFE). – On Uranus or Neptune it can rain diamonds. A new study not only supports this theory, but presents a method that could lead to a new method for creating nanodiamonds from PET in plastic bottles.

On Earth, nanodiamonds have applications for medical sensors, non-invasive surgery, or quantum electronics: on giant icy planets, it rains diamonds.

A team of German and French scientists, who published their findings in Science Advances, have used laser flashes to simulate the process on these icy giant planets and power a new process for producing tiny diamonds.

Conditions inside these planets are harsh, with temperatures reaching several thousand degrees Celsius and pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s atmosphere, but their activity can be briefly simulated in the laboratory.

The researchers used PET to reproduce the general chemical composition of Neptune and Uranus, based on carbon and hydrogen, among other elements, and large amounts of oxygen, German research laboratory Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden Rosendorf said in a statement.

“PET has a good balance of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate the activity of icy planets,” explained Dominic Krause, of Germany’s University of Rostock and one of the authors of the article.

In their research, they used a high-powered optical laser to create shock waves in a PET sheet, after which they analyzed what was going on in the plastic using X-ray pulses.

In the experiment, powerful laser flashes were fired at a thin sheet of PET plastic, briefly heating it to 6000 degrees and generating a shock wave that compressed the material to millions of times atmospheric pressure for a few nanoseconds.

Thus, they observed how the atoms of the material were rearranged into small diamond regions and measured the speed and size of these regions.

The diamond regions grew to a few nanometers in size and found that, in the presence of oxygen from PET, they were able to grow at lower pressures and temperatures than previously observed.

The experiment also opens up prospects for a technical application: the tailor-made production of nano-sized diamonds. “So far, diamonds of this type have been produced mainly by detonating explosives,” Krause said. “With the help of laser flashlights in the future it can be made much cleaner.”

Additionally, the experiment supports the hypothesis that it rains diamonds inside ice giants on the fringes of the solar system, and the team believes it could also happen on other planets in our galaxy.

The researchers predict that the diamonds from Neptune and Uranus would become much larger than the nanodiamonds produced in these experiments, and that, over thousands of years, they would have slowly sank across the ice sheets and formed a thick layer of ice. from the planet. EFE

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