Diamonds Stud the Atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter
Precious gems generated by lightning storms, study says.
Observational evidence of storms on Saturn that actively generate carbon particles, combined with new laboratory experiments and models that show how carbon behaves under extreme conditions, have led a pair of scientists to posit that both planets may offer stable environments for the formation of diamonds.
(Related: "Saturn's Rings Hit by Meteor Shower.")
"We now know the high temperature limit [8,000 Kelvin] for solid diamond, above which it melts. And we also now have more precise pressure [and] temperature structures for the interiors of Saturn and Jupiter," said Kevin Baines, a planetary scientist at University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-author of the study presented this week at a conference in Denver, Colorado.
"These two results together show us for the first time that