Under their thin upper atmospheres, our solar system neighbors Neptune and Uranus are literally raining diamonds in their high-pressure, high-temperature, middle atmospheres. Conditions there are so extreme that researchers could only replicate them in a test space less than a few thousandths of an inch (or a few hundred micrometers) thick—using test materials blasted with lasers creating high-pressure shock waves hotter than the surface of the Sun.
But that was nearly a decade ago. Now researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in northern California have managed to recreate the conditions that exist still deeper within…
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