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The Rains on Other Planets

Did you know that on Venus, it rains sulfuric acid?
On Neptune, it rains diamonds. On Titan, it rains methane, and on exoplanets, it rains iron—even sapphire! Spectacular, right?
Venus has an atmosphere 100 times denser than Earth’s, stretching tens of kilometers upwards. Volcanoes release sulfur, which forms sulfuric acid clouds at about 50 kilometers above the surface. From there, the acid rains down to around 20 kilometers, where it evaporates due to temperatures exceeding 400 degrees Celsius near the planet’s surface.
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is full of clouds, lakes, and rivers—it almost feels like Earth. Except that, at temperatures close to -200 degrees Celsius, it's not water that flows but methane—the same gas we use in our stoves, though in a modified form. You wouldn’t want to be there; you'd suffocate instantly!
On Neptune or Jupiter, you could theoretically "mine" diamonds—but only if you could descend about 6,000 kilometers into their atmospheres. There, the pressure is so intense that methane molecules break apart, freeing carbon atoms that form diamonds. On Jupiter, these diamonds slowly sink toward the hypothesized ocean of metallic hydrogen at the planet’s core.
The most spectacular planets, however, are the hot Jupiters—exoplanets orbiting stars so closely that temperatures reach thousands of degrees Celsius. On some of these worlds, iron in the atmosphere melts and falls as raindrops, while others see aluminum and silicon combine to form sapphire crystals.

#planets #astronomy #science #universe #mars #jupiter #exoplanets