Washington: Scientists have claimed that Jupiter and Saturn just might be filled to the brim with diamonds.
According to the researchers, chunks of diamonds may be floating in hydrogen and helium fluid deep in the atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter, Fox News reported.
What's more, at even lower depths, the extreme pressure and temperature can melt the precious gem, literally making it rain liquid diamond, researchers said.
"The new data available has confirmed that at depth, diamonds may be floating around inside of Saturn, some growing so large that they could perhaps be called 'diamondbergs'," officials from California Specialty Engineering in Pasadena, California, wrote in a statement.
Planetary scientists Mona Delitsky of CSE and Kevin Baines of the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted the research.
Diamonds can form when elemental carbon, like graphite or soot created by huge lightning storms on Saturn, falls into the deep atmosphere of the planet where it is crushed into the gem, Baines and Delitsky said.
Those solid diamonds then move farther into the depths of the planet, where they turn into a liquid near the core.
Scientists have known that stable diamonds may exist in the relatively chilly cores of Neptune and Uranus, but until now, Jupiter and Saturn were thought too hot to allow for solid, stable diamond formation.
"Diamonds are forever on Uranus and Neptune and not on Jupiter and Saturn," Delitsky and Baines wrote.
In a book called Alien Seas (Springer 2013), Baines and Delitsky detailed the story of how robotic mining ships may eventually be able to roam the interior of Saturn sometime in the future to collect diamonds and return them to Earth.
