Research to calculate amount of ‘space grease’ in the Milky Way found enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter 
 
 It looks cold, dark and empty, but astronomers have revealed that interstellar space is permeated with a fine mist of grease-like molecules. 
 
 The study provides the most precise estimate yet of the amount of “space grease” in the Milky Way, by recreating the carbon-based compounds in the laboratory. The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter. 
 
 Prof Tim Schmidt, a chemist at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and co-author of the study, said that the windscreen of a future spaceship travelling through interstellar space might be expected to get a sticky coating. 
 
 “Amongst other stuff it’ll run into is interstellar dust, which is partly grease, partly soot and partly silicates like sand,” he said, adding that the grease is swept away within our own solar system by the solar wind. 
 
 The findings bring scientists closer to figuring out the total amount of carbon in interstellar space, which fuels the formation of stars, planets and is essential for life. 
 
 Until now there has been uncertainty over how much carbon is drifting between the stars. About half is expected to be found in its pure form. The rest is chemically bound with hydrogen in either a grease-like form, known as aliphatic carbon, or as a gaseous version of naphthalene, the main chemical component of mothballs. 
 
 To tackle the question, Schmidt and colleagues recreated in the laboratory the process by which greasy carbon forms in the outflows of carbon stars. The material was collected and analysed using spectroscopy to work out how strongly it absorbed light of certain wavelengths. 
 
 “This allowed us to figure out how much greasy carbon is in the line of sight of various stars,” said Schmidt. 
 
 They found that there are about 100 greasy carbon atoms for every million hydrogen atoms, accounting for between a quarter and a half of the available carbon in the Milky Way. 
 
 “This space grease is not the kind of thing you’d want to spread on a slice of toast,” said Schmidt. “It’s dirty, likely toxic and only forms in the environment of interstellar space – and our laboratory.” 
 
 The team now plans to determine the abundance of the mothball-like carbon, which will involve more laboratory experiments. By firmly establishing the amount of each type of carbon in the dust, they will know precisely how much of this element is available to create life. “It’s part of understanding the great life-cycle of carbon,” said Schmidt. “It’s made in stars, goes through the interstellar medium and gets incorporated into new planetary systems and has ended up incorporated into life. It’s part of the big story, the biggest story there is.” 
 
 Helen Fraser, a senior lecturer in astronomy at the Open University, said: “It remains a major question in astronomy how dust forms, evolves and is destroyed.” 
 
 Fraser said the work suggests that are many more “grease-like” molecules in space than previously thought. “The consequence could be important in how such dust grains stick and form planets, or even ‘seed’ planetary surfaces with the ingredients for the origins of life,” she added. 
 
 The findings were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. ||||| (CNN) Space is full of grease-like molecules, according to a new study that attempted to mimic interstellar dust in a laboratory. 
 
 The study, conducted by the University of New South Wales in Australia and Ege University in Turkey, sought to better estimate how much organic matter is in space, giving scientists greater insight into how life is formed. 
 
 A team of eight scientists recreated and analyzed material similar to interstellar dust, and used it to estimated how many grease-like carbon molecules (scientifically known as aliphatic carbon) are in interstellar space, beyond the bounds of our solar system. 
 
 The estimated amount of "space grease" in the Milky Way far exceeded expectations: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes -- or enough to fill 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter. 
 
 NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic matter in the soil on Mars 
 
 Space is not just greasy, but dirty, said Tim Schmidt, co-author of the study and professor at UNSW. 
 
 Read More ||||| NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute 
 
 Forget diamonds in the sky — it may actually be raining diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter, according to two planetary scientists1. 
 
 Researchers have long wondered whether the high pressures inside the giant planets could turn carbon into diamond2, and even though some researchers dispute their claim, Mona Delitsky of California Specialty Engineering in Flintridge, and Kevin Baines of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, now say it is possible. They are laying out their argument this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Denver, Colorado. 
 
 In their scenario, lightning zaps molecules of methane in the upper atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter, liberating carbon atoms. These atoms then stick onto each other, forming larger particles of carbon soot, which the Cassini spacecraft may have spotted in dark storm clouds on Saturn3. As the soot particles slowly float down through ever-denser layers of gaseous and liquid hydrogen towards the planets' rocky cores, they experience ever greater pressures and temperatures. The soot is compressed into graphite, and then into solid diamonds before reaching a temperature of about 8,000 °C, when the diamond melts, forming liquid diamond raindrops, they say. 
 
 Precious rain 
 
 Image courtesy of Michael Carroll Alien Seas: Oceans in space (Springer 2013 ) 
 
 Inside Saturn, the conditions are right for diamond 'hail' to form, beginning at a depth of about 6,000 kilometres into the atmosphere and extending for another 30,000 km below that, says Baines. He estimates that Saturn may harbour about 10 million tonnes of diamond produced this way, with most of it made up of rocks no bigger than a millimetre and perhaps some chunks spanning 10 centimetres. 
 
 "If you had a robot there, it would sit there and collect diamonds raining down," Baines says. Indeed, this is just what happens in a piece of sci-fi the authors wrote to augment a recent non-fiction book chapter4 on the science of Saturn's fluid atmosphere. In their vision of the year 2469, diamonds would be collected on Saturn and used to make the ultra-strong hulls of mining ships delving deep into the planet's interior to collect helium-3 for clean-burning fusion fuel. The diamonds must stay in Saturn to prevent havoc in financial markets on Earth. 
 
 Delitsky and Baines concluded that diamond would be stable inside the giant planets by comparing recent studies that experimentally fleshed out the temperatures and pressures at which carbon takes on different forms5, such as solid diamond, and others that modelled the pressure and temperature at different depths within the giant planets6. "We put together two pieces of information from different sources to conclude that diamonds are likely to be existing in the deep interiors of Saturn and Jupiter," says Delitsky. 
 
 Thermodynamic objections 
 
 But others dispute the researchers' claim, arguing that these two gas giants of the Solar System are probably devoid of bling. David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says the pair did not properly account for thermodynamics. Methane forms a very small fraction of the mostly hydrogen atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn – 0.2% and 0.5%, respectively. In such dilute systems, "thermodynamics favours mixtures", says Stevenson. "It's the same thermodynamics that explains why a small amount of sugar or salt will dissolve in a large amount of water, especially at high temperature," he says. "Even if you made carbon dust, it would just dissolve as it went down into the interior very very quickly.“ 
 
 Luca Ghiringhelli, a physicist at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, Germany, is also sceptical of the pair's conclusions. His own previous research7 showed that the concentration of carbon is not high enough in Uranus and Neptune — which are several times richer in carbon than Jupiter and Saturn — to grow diamond from the 'ground up', building the crystals atom by atom. He did not model whether diamond could instead form by the compression of soot, but says it is premature to assume that would do so. "It is very optimistic to drive conclusions on the existence of diamonds on Saturn from the scarce data we have, and without a convincing model," he says. That may give financial regulators one less thing to worry about in the coming centuries.
– President Trump's "Space Force" might need to carry some heavy-duty cleaning products. A team of astronomers has determined that the universe is a much greasier and dirtier place than once thought, with grease-like molecules known as aliphatic carbon thinly spread throughout interstellar space, the Guardian reports. As part of a project to calculate the amount of carbon—essential for the formation of planets and life—that exists between the stars, the astronomers recreated the interstellar dust generated by carbon stars and discovered that the Milky Way alone holds around 10 billion trillion trillion tons of "space grease." Solar wind keeps much of it out of our solar system, but any spacecraft travelling between the stars is likely to arrive with a sticky, dirty coating of carbon. "This space grease is not the kind of thing you'd want to spread on a slice of toast," says study co-author Tim Schmidt of the University of New South Wales. "It's dirty, likely toxic and only forms in the environment of interstellar space—and our laboratory." Schmidt tells CNN that the substance is like greasy soot. "It's not a pure substance, it's not biological," he says. "It would make things dirty like soot would." About half the carbon in space is thought to be elemental carbon. The team, whose research is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, now plans to calculate how much of the third form of interstellar carbon, aromatic "mothball" carbon, exists in our galaxy. (A black hole "farm" has been detected at the center of the Milky Way.)