Researchers already knew that with extreme pressure and high temperatures several kilometers below
In 2017, researchers from Germany and the US founda way to replicate these planetary conditions is by making tiny diamonds in the lab using polystyrene. Now they are back to experimenting again, this time using polyethylene terephthalate (PET). They made diamonds out of plastic waste.
When researchers first tried to getpolystyrene nanodiamonds, they irradiated the material with a coherent light source, a high-power X-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. This process quickly heated the polystyrene to 4726°C and compressed it by 150 gigapascals.
Although the researchers were able tomicroscopic trinket using two fast lasers, they later realized they were missing one vital chemical ingredient: oxygen. So they used PET, which has a good balance of not only carbon and hydrogen, but also oxygen, making it a closer chemical analog of the ice giants than polystyrene.
“In our experiments, we have not yet seen directevidence of the formation of superionic water along with diamonds,” the researchers noted. “But our experiments show that carbon is separated from hydrogen and oxygen, which allows regions of pure water to form inside planets. Thus, by making diamond precipitation a more realistic scenario within these planets, the formation of superionic water also becomes more likely."
If we discard superionic water, scientists have toto conduct some more research in the field of nanodiamonds. They are looking for ways to make large quantities of tiny gems in minutes and with more affordable but still high energy laser systems.
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