ice giants tagged posts

Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth or even in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—it happens in the interiors of ice giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressures and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside these planets. For the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates this phenomenon.

A new paper by physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves the 20-year-old scientific mystery and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output.

Let’s talk about the actual experiment first...