Some areas of the U.S., including Philadelphia, Pa., can expect to have stormy weather this Independence Day weekend. However, those storms are nothing like the showers of diamonds found on two other planets in our solar system.
During a recent interview with NASA’s Gravity Assist, astrophysicist Naomi Rowe-Gurney explained how gas giants Uranus and Neptune rain what we on Earth consider precious gemstones.
First, both planets are partially made of methane, which gives them a blue hue.
“Well, methane has carbon in it and that carbon can occur by itself and also be crushed by the immense pressures that happen, like, deep in the atmosphere, so much deeper than the levels that I look at,” Rowe-Gurney said. In addition to methane, Uranus and Neptune both have atmospheres made up of molecular hydrogen and atomic helium.
At the center of both planets is a small, rocky core.
“Inside the planet, when it gets really hot and really dense, these, these diamonds form and accumulate, and then they become even heavier,” said Rowe-Gurney. “And that means that they kind of rain down in the atmosphere.”
However, she said the phenomenon is not something humans would be able to witness. As of the diamonds, they aren’t something we would be able to start using for jewelry.
“It’s not the rain that we see here because these pressures are extreme, and you’ll never be able to get there as a human,” she explained. “So even if these diamonds do exist, we would never be able to go and grab them.”
Here on Earth, it looks as if we will have to settle for terrestrial diamonds – some of which are going up in price due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Bloomberg – for the time being.
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