On Jupiter and Saturn, diamonds fall as rain

On Jupiter and Saturn, half-inch diamonds fall from the atmosphere like rain. No, this writer isn’t enjoying a particularly opulent LSD trip: New research by a NASA scientist says that up to 1,000 tonnes (2.2 million pounds) of diamonds are created in Saturn’s atmosphere every year, with Jupiter’s atmosphere being a prodigious producer of diamonds as well.

This new research was presented at an annual American Astronomical Society meeting by Kevin Baines of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s JPL, and Mona Delitsky of California Speciality Engineering. The research has not yet been published or peer reviewed, but other planetary experts have preliminarily confirmed Baines and Delitsky’s findings. Raymond Jeanloz, one of the scientists who predicted that the atmosphere of Uranus and Neptune are conducive to the formation of diamonds, says the idea of diamond rain on Jupiter and Saturn is “sensible.”

If Saturn and Earth were next to each other in space, this is how their sizes would compare. Jupiter is about 10% larger than Saturn.

At this point, it’s important to remember that these two planets are gas giants with a radius of around 10 times that of Earth. Jupiter is about 87,000 miles (140,000 km) across, and Saturn is around 75,000 miles (120,000 km) across. It’s not certain if either of them have a solid core, but they both likely have a small, rocky core. The majority constituent of both planets, by far, is hydrogen gas. It isn’t known exactly how thick the atmosphere of Jupiter or Saturn is, but it’s at least tens of thousands of miles. Compare this with Earth, where the atmosphere ends at around 62 miles (100 km).

Diamond rain on Jupiter and Saturn begins in the upper atmosphere. Lightning strikes methane, turning it into soot (carbon). As the soot falls, pressure increases, and it turns into graphite. After falling for another 4,000 miles or so, the pressure is so great that the graphite turns into diamond. The diamonds then continue to fall for another 20,000 miles or so (no one knows how far it is to core of Saturn or Jupiter) — almost three times the diameter of Earth — until they reach the core. At this point, the pressure and temperature is probably so high that the diamonds probably turn back into a sea of liquid carbon.

The question on my mind, of course, is whether we could throw out some cosmic buckets to catch some of Jupiter’s diamond rain. The answer is probably yes, but it would be prohibitively expensive, and there are lots of scientific endeavors (probes, orbiters, rovers, etc.) that surely take precedence over furnishing our women with large, intragalactic diamonds. Actually, on second thought, I’m not so sure about that…

In related news, back in 2012 scientists discovered a nearby super-Earth which is up to one-third solid diamond, and below is a recently discovered storm on Saturn — dubbed the The Rose of Saturn — that’s twice the width of Earth, and probably producing a lot of diamond rain.