A wonderful symbol for this order out of chaos is the fact that on Neptune, the atmosphere is so volatile and chaotic and the pressure is high enough, that scientists suspect it sometimes rains diamonds on it .

Diamond rain could be "the most common precipitation in the Solar System" the authors say Each possible composition of the carbon layer—solid, liquid, or mixed—would affect the core of the planet differently. "Once you get down to those extreme depths, the pressure and temperature is so hellish, there's no way the diamonds could remain solid.

Even this more limited goal is extremely challenging, since we need to reliably generate and measure pressures of several million atmospheres and temperatures of several thousand kelvins to simulate their effects on the elements found inside the ice giants. – Science Times. Simulations suggest that gravity compresses the “ices” in this middle layer to high densities, and the internal heat raises the internal temperatures to several thousand kelvins. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on! Because there's no way you can go and observe it. It limits our understanding of the Solar System and the galaxy, because planets of this size have turned out to be extremely common in the Milky Way. "By a depth of 6,000km, these chunks of falling graphite toughen into diamonds - strong and unreactive.These continue to fall for another 30,000km - "about two-and-a-half Earth-spans" says Baines. These are external links and will open in a new windowDiamonds big enough to be worn by Hollywood film stars could be raining down on Saturn and Jupiter, US scientists have calculated.New atmospheric data for the gas giants indicates that carbon is abundant in its dazzling crystal form, they say.Lightning storms turn methane into soot (carbon) which as it falls hardens into chunks of graphite and then diamond.These diamond "hail stones" eventually melt into a liquid sea in the planets' hot cores, The biggest diamonds would likely be about a centimetre in diameter - "big enough to put on a ring, although of course they would be uncut," says Dr Kevin Baines, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.He added they would be of a size that the late film actress Elizabeth Taylor would have been "proud to wear". Scientists instead have tried to recreate the extreme conditions of planetary interiors in their laboratories.

If the layer is a mix of solid and liquid carbon, the solid carbon would be of lower density than the liquid, with the result that large “diamond bergs” would float on top of an ocean of liquid carbon.

Even though diamond anvils can generate pressures of several megabars (comparable to the pressure that would be produced by placing several thousand African elephants on top of that high-heeled shoe), the sample also needs to be heated by electrical currents or lasers in order to mimic hot planetary interiors. "The bottom line is that 1,000 tonnes of diamonds a year are being created on Saturn.

Image caption Diamond rain could be "the most common precipitation in the Solar System" the authors say .

"One possibility is that a "sea" of liquid carbon could form. The formation rates observed in the lab suggest that within Uranus and Neptune, where there have been many millions of years to grow diamonds, meter-sized carbon crystals can form.Understanding the inner processes of the ice giants gives clues to the features of these planets. The same effect of pressure enhancement can be seen on a different scale by placing something underneath the heel of a high-heeled shoe. Solid diamond, for example, is electrically insulating and has a stiff crystal lattice, whereas liquid carbon is a metallic conductor and flexible. Discoveries such as these reveal the complexity of the chemical processes involved in the evolution of these planets. Another fortuitous alignment of the planets won’t come for another two generations, so now is the time to start thinking about exploring the ice giants up close and learning more about the Solar System’s intriguing diamond worlds.Art and science have long had a false divide, but...© 2020 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society So we do not know if diamond formation occurs at all. "We cannot exclude the proposed scenario (diamond rain on Saturn and Jupiter) but we simply have no data on mixtures in the planets.

But they are on Uranus and Neptune, which are colder at their cores," says Baines.The findings are yet to be peer reviewed, but other planetary experts contacted by BBC News said the possibility of diamond rain "cannot be dismissed". "It all boils down to the chemistry. Such an internal energy source may help to account for the origin of the surprisingly violent storms that are observed on the planet’s surface.Diamond formation may also explain why the ice giant planets’ magnetic fields are so exotic. And islands of order like a star and its planetary system eventually disintegrate into chaos out of which new structures are created. Our simulations give clues to the internal nature of worlds far beyond the Solar System, even worlds that we may never see directly from the outside.Neptune and Uranus are called the “ice giants“ of our Solar System because their outer two layers consist of compounds that include hydrogen and helium.

"Baines and Delitsky considered the data for pure carbon, instead of a carbon-hydrogen-helium mixture," she explained.

Plastics, which are mainly made out of carbon and hydrogen, are useful substances to mimic the material mix in the ice layers of Neptune and Uranus. Using such a setup, some experiments have indeed formed diamond. "Meanwhile, an exoplanet that was believed to consist largely of diamond may not be so precious after all, according to new research.The so-called "diamond planet" 55 Cancri e orbits a star 40 light-years from our Solar System.A study in 2010 suggested it was a rocky world with a surface of graphite surrounding a thick layer of diamond, instead of water and granite like Earth.Carbon, the element diamonds are made of, now appears to be less abundant in relation to oxygen in the planet's host star - and by extension, perhaps the planet. Models suggest the diamonds collect in a layer just above the planet’s core.However, it is the “ice” in the deep middle layers that really shapes their properties.