Planets where it rains diamonds
Forget water! Some planets have skies that drop solid gems instead of raindrops
Imagine a storm where the hail hitting the ground is actually solid diamond
Gut call — how extreme does this actually get?
Reality tends to overshoot. Pick your ceiling.
- Forget water! Some planets have skies that drop solid gems instead of raindrops
- In the deepest layers of these planets, these diamond hailstones are estimated to be about a centimeter in diameter.
- On Neptune and Uranus, the pressure is even higher, which might lead to the formation of "diamond icebergs" floating on seas of liquid diamond.
On Jupiter and Saturn, the atmosphere is so extreme that it turns soot into solid diamonds. It starts as methane gas in the upper atmosphere, which gets hit by lightning and turned into clouds of black soot.
As this soot falls toward the core, the atmospheric pressure increases to over 100,000 times that of Earth. This massive weight crushes the carbon into graphite and then eventually into hard, solid diamonds.
In the deepest layers of these planets, these diamond hailstones are estimated to be about a centimeter in diameter. Scientists believe that roughly 1,000 tons of diamonds are produced on Saturn every single year.
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