No giggling at the back (Picture Getty)

Scientists have long suspected it, but there is something very, very hard near Uranus – rains of solid diamonds to be precise.

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Stanford researchers now believe that huge diamonds – possibly millions of carats – sink towards the core of Uranus.

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In an experiment designed to mimic the conditions on icy gas giants such as Uranus and the less amusing Neptune, scientists observed ‘diamond rain’ forming in high-pressure conditions for the first time.


Extremely high pressure squeezes hydrogen and carbon found in the interior of these planets to form solid diamonds that sink slowly down further into the interior.

The MEC hutch of SLAC’s LCLS Far Experiement Hall

The glittering rain is thought to arise more than 5,000 miles below the surfaces of Uranus and Neptune.



The interiors of these planets are similar – both contain solid cores surrounded by a dense slush of different ices.

Researchers simulated the environment found inside these planets by creating shock waves in plastic with an intense optical laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s X-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

‘Previously, researchers could only assume that the diamonds had formed,’ said Dominik Kraus, scientist at Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and lead author on the publication.

‘When I saw the results of this latest experiment, it was one of the best moments of my scientific career.’

In the experiment, the scientists were able to see that nearly every carbon atom of the original plastic was incorporated into small diamond structures up to a few nanometers wide.

On Uranus and Neptune, the study authors predict that diamonds would become much larger, maybe millions of carats in weight.

Researchers also think it’s possible that over thousands of years, the diamonds slowly sink through the planets’ ice layers and assemble into a thick layer around the core.

Has Uranus been probed? NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January 1986. At its closest, the spacecraft came within 81,500 kilometres (50,600 miles) of Uranus’s cloudtops on January 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus. A map of the outer solar system (Picture: AFP/Getty) Since launch on August 20, 1977, Voyager 2’s itinerary has taken the spacecraft to Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, and then Uranus. Voyager 2’s next encounter was with Neptune in August 1989. Both Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, will eventually leave our solar system and enter interstellar space. MORE: Sorry, you’ve probably been saying the word Uranus wrong your whole life Voyager 2’s images of the five largest moons around Uranus revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts. The cameras also detected 10 previously unseen moons. The 11 rings of Uranus, opaque and a few kilometres wide each, are relatively young in space terms – not more than 600 million years old. They were probably formed by collisional fragmentation of several moons that once orbited the planet (Picture: BSIP/UIG Via Getty) Several instruments studied the ring system, uncovering the fine detail of the previously known rings and two newly detected rings. Voyager data showed that the planet’s rate of rotation is 17 hours, 14 minutes. The spacecraft also found a Uranian magnetic field that is both large and unusual. In addition, the temperature of the equatorial region, which receives less sunlight over a Uranian year, is nevertheless about the same as that at the poles.