New Lasers Re-Create Planet Formation of Super-Earths and Giant Planets in the Lab

Can you imagine creating planets in the lab? That's just what scientists are doing. They're conducted new laser-driven compression experiments to reproduce the conditions deep inside exotic super-Earths and giant planet cores, and the conditions during the violent birth of Earth-like planets, documenting the material properties that determined planet formation and evolution.

So exactly how do they manage this feat? The scientists used laser-driven shock compression and ultrafast diagnostics. This allowed the researchers to measure the melting temperature of silica at 500 GPa, which is five million atmospheres. This is the mantle boundary pressure for a super-Earth planet, Uranus and Neptune. It's also the regime of giant impacts that characterize the final stages of planet formation.

"Deep inside planets, extreme density, pressure and temperature strongly modify the properties of the constituent materials," said Marius Millot, one of the researchers, in a news release. "How much heat solids can sustain before melting under pressure is key to determining a planet's internal structure and evolution, and now we can measure it directly in the laboratory."

This new data reveals that mantle silicates and core metal have comparable melting temperatures above 300-500 GPa. This suggests that large rocky planets may commonly have long-lived oceans of magma deep inside themselves. Planetary magnetic fields can also be formed in this liquid-rock layer. What's also interesting is that the new results suggest that silica is likely solid inside Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter cores, which sets new constrains of future models of these planets.

The findings reveal a bit more about the types of planets that exist in our universe. This is particularly important to note after the recent discovery of more than 1,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. These findings may just shed some light on what some of these planets are like.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

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