Yesterday’s blog post took you on a galactic mining expedition for diamonds. Our destination was a white dwarf, the largest diamond mine in the galaxy. Unfortunately, the nearest white dwarf is 8.6 light years away! Can we find any space diamonds closer to home? To learn the answer, our next destination is the outer reaches of our own solar system, to the giant gaseous planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The other planets in our solar system are rocky balls  (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) or frozen balls of ice (Pluto and its moon Charon, which may actually have been its own planet at one time). However, the four larger planets are made up mainly of gas! 

Kind of neat, for sure, but what does this have to do with diamonds? The main gases that surround these planets (each also has a small rocky core at the center) are hydrogen and helium, the gases found in the Sun. But they also contain carbon gas. Some scientists think that the high temperatures and pressures found in the atmospheres of these gas giants could actually result in the formation of diamonds right in the atmosphere. Wow! Talk about money falling from heaven! But is it fact or fantasy? To find out, our journey takes us back to good old planet Earth. Straight to the Netherlands (Holland) in fact, where scientists have been calculating the temperatures and pressures found on these planets. Their opinion: solid carbon, like that found in a pencil, could probably form in the atmospheres of the gas giants, but as for diamonds… not a chance! Well, actually there is a small chance, but it is really, really unlikely. So if you are thinking of a career in space diamond mining, you might want to think again