It's raining gems

Roll-up, roll-up! For we have an offer you can’t possibly refuse. A business venture to end all business ventures. And, you lucky people, all we need is your money and your expertise.

OK – here’s the pitch. Diamonds. People love them. And, crucially, they’ll pay handsomely to acquire them. Our plan is to collect some…then sell them.

Simplistic? Sure – idiotically so. But it is the location from which we plan to collect the diamonds that is key. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences a few years back ago Dr Kevin Baines said something remarkable. He thinks that 1,000 tonnes of diamonds a year are being created on Saturn.

Dr Baines, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks that lightning in the upper atmosphere of Saturn turns methane into soot which, as it plunges deeper into the vice-like grip of Saturn’s atmospheric layers, turns into graphite. Then, at a depth of around 6,000km, the pressure is enough to further crush the sheets of graphite into diamonds. They then plummet a further 30,000 km where they…well, no one really knows. In all likelihood, says Dr Baines, a sea of liquid carbon awaits to melt the falling diamonds.

Simply put – it rains diamonds on Saturn. And, as mentioned, we want to collect some… then sell them. Sure they may be a few insignificant problems. Problems like getting to Saturn (at its closest, the be-ringed gas giant is around 746 million miles from Earth); navigating the intense winds (which can reach 1,100mph at the equator) and bone crushing pressure of the atmospheric layers; managing the magnetic field (about 578 times more powerful than our own); collecting the falling diamonds and returning them back to Earth. Oh, and the money. The vast, almost offensively enormous amounts of money it’ll take to make this happen. But these are mere trifling hiccups at worst. Negligible flies in an otherwise flawless ointment.

A perfect plan then… unyet, unyet, unyet… Some pesky work has just come out of Germany. It turns out be just as likely it rains diamonds on Neptune and Uranus. And now a team based at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf – the German institute – have recreated the conditions found deep inside these icy giants and, you guessed it, made diamonds.

To do this, they basically squashed plastic with sound. Using ‘extreme soundwaves’ generating crazy pressures (150 gigapascals) and even crazier temperatures (5,000oC) they turned the carbon in polystyrene into diamonds. Nifty... damned nifty. No need, then, to go to the trouble of fetching these celestial gems. Disappointing. It appears our fortune may not lay in becoming the frontiersmen and women of the interplanetary diamond-rush after all.

And with that, we had better take off these preposterous astronaut costumes…