Diamond rain
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Diamond rain is a phenomenon common to gas giants with large amounts of methane in their atmospheres. Where pressures reach in excess of 20,000 atmospheres, the carbon in these methane molecules will dehydrogenate, forming bonds with other carbon molecules. The most stable polymorph of carbon at these pressures is diamond.
In certain levels of the atmosphere a gas giant of this nature will have storms or "mists" of diamonds. Some enterprising people and companies have actually used dredges or probes to collect these diamonds for commercial processing.
..
This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.