Its really cool to watch, said Benedetti. When you turn on the laser the methane turns black because of all the diamonds created. The black diamond specks float in a clear hydrocarbon liquid melted by the laser.
Raman spectroscopy confirmed the identity of the suspended specks, as did subsequent analysis with X-ray crystallography. The flecks were diamonds interspersed with hydrocarbons.
Jeanloz said that the high temperature breaks up methane into carbon and hydrogen, while high pressure condenses the carbon to diamond. Other types of hydrocarbons -- doubly and triply bonded carbon -- also were produced, apparently in the cooler areas outside that illuminated by the laser.
Jeanloz and his team plan next to see what happens to other constituents of these planets -- ammonia and water -- at high temperatures and pressures.
Coauthors of the paper with Benedetti and Jeanloz are post-doctoral researcher Jeffrey H. Nguyen, now a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; geology graduate student Wendell A. Caldwell, Chinese visiting scholar Hongjian Liu and Michael Kruger, a former graduate student now in the physics department at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Diamonds From The Sky
Amherst - August 9, 1999 - In the Aug. 6 issue of the journal Science, University of Massachusetts geoscientist Stephen Haggerty contends that some of the carbon in diamonds comes from outer space.
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