BUILDING
A PLANET
ON EARTH
In labs around the world,
scientists are finding ways
to recreate the ferocious
conditions inside gas giant
planets to finally uncover
what lies within
WORDS: ANDY RIDGWAYarely audible above the general drone of a lab,
there’s a high-pitched snap; a nauseating
crack. Yet to the physicists at work, this is an
all too familiar sound. They are using a device that
would fit in the palm of your hand called a ‘diamond
anvil cell’, which could help answer questions about
the for mation of planets. That tiny snapping sound,
roughly the same volume as a coin hitting the ground,
tells researchers when they have pushed their
equipment beyond its limits.
In January this year, physicists at the University of
Edinburgh announced that they had managed to
recreate the ‘metallic phase’ of hydrogen by using
diamond anvil cells to squeeze the gas to pressures
equivalent to nearly four million times the Earth’s
atmospheric pressure. This is important because the
metallic phase of hydrogen was first predicted to exist
80 years ago, and is thought to play a vital role in
the inner workings of a gas giant. Teams fromB
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