How do you make nanodiamonds? Merge carbon 'onions'

STRANGE parents should have unusual offspring. Sure enough, when two carbon "onions" collide, a nanodiamond is born. It's an insight into the weird chemistry that arises in outer space.

Meteorites are home to diamonds a few nanometres wide but how these tiny crystals form is a mystery. A precursor could be the equally exotic nested carbon cages called carbon onions that lurk in interstellar space. When Nigel Marks of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and colleagues simulated collisions between two carbon onions, and carbon onions and dust grains, both produced nanodiamonds (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.075503).

Clouds of dust around ageing, carbon-rich stars and dusty planet-forming discs could host such collisions. When the dust gets baked into asteroids, chips can fall to Earth as meteorites.

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