A massive gas giant orbiting a star about 855 light-years from Earth, WASP-121b may have metal clouds and rain made of liquid gems, according to new research. A study showing how water atmospherically cycles between the planet's two sides published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The diamond rain phenomenon is believed by some scientists to take place on Uranus and Neptune in our solar system. It is thought it exists some 8,000 km below the surface of our ice giant neighbours, created from commonly found mixtures of hydrogen and carbon, squeezed together at incredible pressure.
Earth and Saturn's moon Titan are the only worlds in our solar system where liquid rain hits a surface.
Deep within Neptune and Uranus, it rains diamonds—or so astronomers and physicists have suspected for nearly 40 years. The outer planets of our Solar System are hard to study, however.
Uranus and Neptune are two of the many exciting and mysterious objects in our universe that the James Webb Space Telescope will soon begin to explore. Temperature and pressure conditions are so extreme on these planets that carbon atoms could be crushed into diamonds in their atmospheres.
Tidally locked hot Jupiter WASP-121b has an atmosphere so hot on one side that it breaks down water molecules and rains rubies and sapphires.
New research by scientists apparently shows that it rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn. In fact the planets have the capability to create 1000 tonnes of diamonds a year.
The weather on this piping hot exoplanet is truly out of this world. A massive gas giant orbiting a star about 855 light-years from Earth, WASP-121b may have metal clouds and rain made of liquid gems, according to new research.
While the red planet's thin atmosphere and bitter cold temperatures keep these frozen clouds from ever falling in the form of rain and snow we see here on Earth, there is actually a type of precipitation on Mars. "This precipitation most likely takes the form of frost," NASA explains.
Some recent studies, with the assistance of chemistry, have assured that there are millions of tons of diamonds in the skies of Saturn and Jupiter.
"Black Rain" on Callisto and Ganymede.
Kepler-13Ab is tidally locked with its sun, meaning one side always faces the star while the other side is condemned to eternal darkness. The Penn State scientists were initially looking at the giant planet's atmosphere and how such temperature discrepancies would effect it when they discovered the raining sunscreen.
As Scientific American reports, Pluto is one of the handful of solar system bodies that seems to have some form of snow; the others include Titan, Io, Mars and, of course, Earth. But on Pluto, uniquely, almost the entire atmosphere may fall as snow.
On Saturn it occasionally rains diamonds.
Oceans of Liquid Diamond May Exist On Neptune and Uranus.
No other planet in our solar system has rings as splendid as Saturn's. They are so expansive and bright that they were discovered as soon as humans began pointing telescopes at the night sky.
The acid rain on Venus is caused by the reaction of sulphur dioxide and water in the planet's atmosphere. Despite being many times more corrosive than the most acidic rain on Earth, Venusian rainstorms are not a significant contributor to surface erosion.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mars was once a wet world, with abundant bodies of water on its surface. But this changed dramatically billions of years ago, leaving behind the desolate landscape known today.
Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan's thick crust of water ice is more liquid—an ocean primarily of water rather than methane.
Ever since astronomers discovered the exoplanet WASP-76b about 640 light years from Earth, they've known it was a hellish world with temperatures so extreme that it rains molten iron every day.
Now add this fact to the list of crazy things about space: on Venus, it snows metal. At the very top of Venus's mountains, beneath the thick clouds, is a layer of snow.
Jupiter's strangest feature, however, may be a 25,000 mile deep soup of exotic fluid sloshing around its interior. It's called liquid metallic hydrogen.
Diamond rain forms when hydrogen and carbon found in the interior of these planets are squeezed by the high pressure and form solid diamonds that sink slowly further into the interior. The research has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
NASA has taken a closer look at 55 Cancri e, an exoplanet that earned the nickname "diamond planet" due to research that suggests it has a carbon-rich composition.
In the lower depths of Saturn and Jupiter, the temperature and pressure conditions are so extreme that the diamonds can melt into liquid, forming diamond "rain" drops. Diamonds don't melt under the 1 atm pressure at Earth's surface, even at extremely high temperatures. Instead, they sublime directly to vapor.