NASA Looking For "Diamonds In The Sky"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Scientist Charles Bauschlicher and his research team have found a new way to look for 'diamonds in the sky'. It may not be romantic, but diamonds shine especially brightly in the 3.4 to 3.5 micron and 6 to 10 micron infrared ranges, which should make NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope the perfect tool to see them with. Though less common and more monopolized on earth, diamonds are surprisingly common in outer space and the nanometer-sized bits comprise 3% of all the carbon found in meteorites. That means that if meteorite composition is representative of interstellar dust, that dust would contain about 10 quadrillion (1 * 10^16) nanodiamonds per gram."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Diamonds at the core of gas giants?

[delibes]

Maybe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPM_37093 [wikipedia.org] But you're unlikely to get your hand on it. Still it's nice to imagine isn't it?

Re:DeBeers should be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

They pretty much are on Earth already. There's nothing special about diamonds, really. DeBeers has spent decades convincing everyone how great they are because they've locked up the supply chain from end to end. Search on "blood diamonds" some time.

Re:More useful measurement?

[reverseengineer]

Taking the density of diamond to be 3.5 grams per cubic centimeter, and these diamonds to each have a volume of about 1 cubic nanometer, the average interstellar nanodiamond has a carat weight of 1.75*10^-20 carats (One carat is 200 milligrams). The interstellar molecular clouds where we would expect to find these diamonds have a density [princeton.edu] of about 2 x 10^-22 grams per cubic centimeter; one cubic centimeter is about 3.4*10^-56 cubic parsecs, so there are about 5.9*10^33 grams of matter in a cubic parsec.

Using the figure from the article, we could then expect there to be as many as 5.9*10^49 diamonds in a cubic parsec, with a total mass of 2×10^26 kilograms, and a total carat weight around 10^30 carats in a cubic parsec. Alas, not exactly gem quality material.

Some notes:
A well-formed 1 cubic nanometer diamond crystal would have about 175 carbon atoms total.

Our solar system has a total mass of about 2*10^30 kg, 99.8% of which is the sun.

The mass of the earth is about 6*10^24 kilograms.

If split among the population of earth, your share of the diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud comes to about 30 trillion tons.

If you merged all the nanoscale diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud into a single diamond, it would have a volume of 5.7*10^13 cubic km, about 50 times that of the earth.

Re:DeBeers should be happy

[wdebruij]

Or read this great example of investigative reporting from 1982:
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond [theatlantic.com].
It's all still true today (although you might have to swap some
country names here and there).

Even if you don't care about diamonds per se, the "gem" diamond business
is interesting for its unique economy and as an example of the power of
PR firms.

I will never by a "natural gem" in my life. Nothing says I love you like
pure zirkonium. Not that any woman would know the difference, anyway.

Re:DeBeers should be happy

[antic]

You can bet that even if masses of diamonds from some extraterrestrial source flooded the market here, and the usual culprits weren't getting their usual share/control, that they'd bump up the marketing suggesting that those weren't the same, weren't as special, weren't as rare, etc. Witness the diamond testing systems that look for flaws to ascertain whether a gem is artificial. Crazy.