A team of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the universities of California and Princeton, in the USA, has managed to recreate the conditions that exist inside the giant planets , such as Jupiter or many others found outside our solar system. .
These experts hope that the progress will allow the development of new tools that allow knowing and measuring the processes that control the formation and evolution of these objects.
According to an article published in the journal Nature , the scientists focused on the study of carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos after hydrogen, helium and oxygen, which plays a determining role in the geological history of these worlds.
Thus, they used 176 laser beams (part of the largest emitter system of this type of radiation, housed in the National Ignition Facility), to subject tiny diamond samples to a pressure 50 million times higher than that of the Earth's atmosphere , equivalent to to which it could occur in the center of Saturn, for example.
Physicist Ray Smith, who has coordinated this initiative, highlights that “although these types of pressures had already been reached before, during the process shock waves were also generated that gave rise to very high temperatures, of hundreds of thousands of degrees, which did not they corresponded with the models that describe the interior of these planets. The challenge has been to keep them low enough to accommodate them ”.
Photo: Damien Jemison / LLNL
