“If you work
with diamond
anvil cells, you
hear diamonds
breaking a lot
and it’s not your
favourite sound”
PHOTOS: ISTOCK X2McWilliams. “But you can start to see
interesting things happening before the whole
system breaks apart.”
Aside from the short period of time in which to
gather data, the other major challenge is that at the
intense pressures required, many of the analytical
techniques you might want to use – such as X-ray
diffraction that would show whether the hydrogen
has turned into a f luid – simply won’t work. It means
that while researchers are creating a window into gas
giants, it’s a decidedly hazy one.
Then there’s the question of the pressures diamond
anvil cells can create. While the four million
atmospheres generated by diamond anvil cells take us
deeper inside a gas giant than we’ve ventured before, it
is far removed from the pressures near the core of
Jupiter, which can reach up to 4,500 million times
Earth’s atmospheric pressure. But there is a way to get
closer to these unimag inable pressures here on Ear th.
Instead of using blocks of metal tightened with
wrenches, Dr Jon Eggert at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laborator y in Califor nia is using lasers that
create high-pressure shockwaves. At facilities usually
used for nuclear fusion experiments, such as the
OMEGA laser at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics
(LLE) in New York, beams of lasers are focused on
tiny containers f il led with gas g iant gases. W hen
these containers are turned into a plasma, the
resulting shockwave crushes the gas within.SHOCKWAVE SCIENCE
While much higher pressures are achievable in these
‘dynamic experiments’, high temperatures are also
created. “You can measure temperatures in shocks up
to 100,000°C and the temperature in the interior of
Jupiter is estimated to be in the order of 10,000°C toThe OMEGA laser at the
Laboratory for Laser Energetics
crushes gas giant gasesSCIENCE