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Category: space – Page 384

The new research provides a more complete picture of how diamond rain forms on other planets.

Researchers have discovered that “diamond rain,” unique precipitation that has long been speculated to occur on icy giant planets, may occur more frequently than previously believed.

To learn more about the circumstances on the icy giant planets Neptune and Uranus, a group of researchers from Germany and France has created an intriguing experiment, according to an article published by Physic.org on Friday.

A team of researchers have discovered that “diamond rain,” unique precipitation that has long been speculated to occur on ice giant planets, may occur more frequently than previously believed.

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A team of Japanese and US physicists has pushed thousands of Ytterbium atoms to just within a billionth of a degree above absolute zero to understand how matter behaves at these extreme temperatures. The approach treats the atoms as fermions, the type of particles like electrons and protons, that cannot end up in the so-called fifth state of matter at those extreme temperatures: a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

When fermions are actually cooled down, they do exhibit quantum properties in a way that we can’t simulate even with the most powerful supercomputer. These extremely cold atoms are placed in a lattice and they simulate a “Hubbard model” which is used to study the magnetic and superconductive behavior of materials, in particular the collective motion of electrons through them.

The symmetry of these models is known as the special unitary group, or, SU, and depends on the possible spin state. In the case of Ytterbium, that number is 6. Calculating the behavior of just 12 particles in a SU Hubbard model can’t be done with computers. However, as reported in Nature Physics, the team used laser cooling to reduce the temperature of 300,000 atoms to a value almost three billion times colder than the temperature of outer space.

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A new study has found that “diamond rain,” a long-hypothesized exotic type of precipitation on ice giant planets, could be more common than previously thought.

In an earlier experiment, researchers mimicked the and pressures found deep inside ice giants Neptune and Uranus and, for the first time, observed diamond rain as it formed.

Investigating this process in a that more closely resembles the chemical makeup of Neptune and Uranus, scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their colleagues discovered that the presence of oxygen makes diamond formation more likely, allowing them to form and grow at a wider range of conditions and throughout more planets.

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