Uranus and Neptune May Have "Oceans of Diamonds" 347
Third Position writes "Oceans of liquid diamond topped with solid 'icebergs' of the precious gems could be on Uranus and Neptune. The first-ever detailed research into the melting point of diamond found it behaves like water during melting and freezing — with its solid form floating on the liquid. A large diamond ocean on one or both of the planets could provide an explanation for an oddity they both share: unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles." The article doesn't mention what the pressures might be like in these outer-planets environments, but the researchers found that liquefying diamond requires 40 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.
vindication for bluegrass (Score:5, Informative)
Like many sci-fi authors who predicted inventions long before they became practical, bluegrass can now claim [youtube.com] foresight into future scientific advances.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Informative)
liar!
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:4, Informative)
There's at least one notable substance that shares this property: Water. That's why it forms ice on the top surface rather than along the bottom/sides of the container (be that container a bucket, a river, or a lake). This very fact is instrumental to life on our little globe.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:1, Informative)
And pretty much nothing else. Most things contract when they get colder, and become more dense. Water contracts as it cools until around 4'C at which point it begins to expand again.
Re:Actually "Oceans of melted coal" (Score:5, Informative)
Normally when you try to melt a Diamond, the Diamond converts to graphite first and then melts. When the material freezes again, it isn't Diamond anymore. In the case of the article, the Diamond is under so much pressure that it no longer converts to Graphite before melting. When the liquid freezes again, it isn't Coal but Diamond.
Re:pressure off by a magnitude (Score:4, Informative)
The core pressure of Uranus is estimated at 8 million bar, temperature about 5,000 K.
For Neptune, 7 million bar, temperature 5,400 K.
So yes, someone is full of shit.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
No it won't. Diamonds are cheap because of enforced supply. With any likelihood, this would be lobbied to never take off so the diamond supply stays small and controlled.
Diamonds aren't rare. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Much as I'd love to make a great pun about uran (Score:4, Informative)
Escape velocity is such that while humans could be landed on Neptune or Uranus they couldn't be lifted off without advanced fusion powered rockets.
Yeah, well don't forget about the gravity. If humans landed on those planets I doubt they'd be very interested in taking off again. Although they might make good frisbees from then on.
As cmowire pointed out gravity on most of these planets is not so great, with the exception of Jupiter where it is IIRC 2.5 g or so. On saturn it is just over a g and on Uranus and Neptune it is below one g. While their mass is huge their density is low so gravity is modest.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:5, Informative)
Bismuth, Silicon, Germanium and Gallium are all elements that have a solid phase that is less dense than their liquid phase. Acetic acid I hear is less dense in its solid phase but I haven't had a chance to verify this.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:3, Informative)
And you might also be interested to know that a mountain of gold doesn't eve exist on the earth. Apparently all the gold ever refined in the world would only fill a cube 20 meters on each side.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Informative)
You know what else De Beers is peeved about? Man-made [gemesis.com] diamonds [apollodiamond.com]. They're cheaper and more ethical than anything De Beers can find in Sierra Leone.
A C Clarke (Score:4, Informative)
I think it was first mentioned in the book 2010 that Jupiter may have a core of diamond, nd later in the book 2061 an astronomer finds a piece of it (after Jupiter is blown up into a star by the monolith) on Europa.
So it would not be surprising to find diamond at the core of other gas giants. But so what, we could make diamond here on earth for less energy cost than digging it out of a gas giant and bringing it back to earth.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:4, Informative)
Water decreases in density when it freezes because it forms a rigid crystal structure where there's quite a bit of empty space between molecules. Elements, such as carbon, can do that too, except the crystal structure is formed between atoms instead of molecules.
Since the story is about solid diamond being less dense than liquid, why would you claim that elements will always contract as they're cooled?
What's Unlike Like? (Score:5, Informative)
"...unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles."
Unlike Earth, neither does Earth. The Earth's south magnetic pole is presently about 25.6 degrees from the south pole. Granted, that's not 60 degrees, but apparently neither are theirs since according to TFA the magnetic poles on Uranus and Neptune "can be up to 60 degrees off the north-south axis", it they were, there's be no reason to say "can be".
There's no note regarding secondary poles on the giant planets like on the sun, but according the Oersted and Magsat satellite data and article in Nature in 2002 (416/8661, pp 620-623) there's an alternate pole developing in the South Atlantic west of South Africa. There's also a geomagnetic anomaly near Lake Baikal in Siberia that causes deflection in the magnetic field measured as far away as Japan, but there's no evidence (or none as yet) that it's a developing "alternate". But one's enough, when it comes to picking apart TFA. Not only is Earth unlike the Earth they compare against while constructing their theory, it's quite capable of being equal to the giants in its unlikeness in the complete absence of diamond seas with or without diamondbergs.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:5, Informative)
Darkroom photography verifies this. 'Glacial' Acetic Acid is used in developing and fixing photographic film, and particularly silver halide based prints. Normally, it is kept heavily refrigerated between uses to slow evaporation and keep it at the right concentration, and it not infrequently gets cold enough for bits to solidify and float on top. Home photographers, who often left bottles sitting in their darkroom fridge for months, tended to notice sizeable bits more than pros who went through whole bottles in days, and it was some of these amateurs who tried thawing out just the frozen bits, and by proving they worked at the same speed in film processing, showed they were at least roughly the same concentration as the liquid chemical, and were not acetic acid depleted, near pure water ices.
Of course, now that practically nobody actually develops film anymore, what was once well known chemistry for amateur hobbyists becomes unverified rumor to a new generation.
Re:Actually "Oceans of melted coal" (Score:1, Informative)
Uhm, did you read the article?
"When diamond is heated to extreme temperatures it physically changes, from diamond to graphite. The graphite, and not the diamond, then melts into a liquid.The trick for the scientists was to heat the diamond up while simultaneously stopping it from transforming into graphite."
So not just liquid carbon. It would seem that liquid diamond is a distinct form of carbon different from liquid carbon.
Oblig (Score:2, Informative)
De Beers Marketing [howstuffworks.com]
1. A diamond is forever.
2. A diamond is a family heirloom.
3. If he truly loves you, he would buy a diamond that costs him 2 months' salary.
Pure genius.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Informative)
That and Canadian and Russian production that basically broke the cartel.
It might be more accurate to say they joined with the cartel to ensure that profits stay high through artificial scarcity.
grumble grumble grumble (Score:4, Informative)
This is slashdot, so I suppose it should not come as a shock that the summary makes claims that don't stand up to even a casual examination. About 15 seconds on google scholar produces the following paper:
Correa, A.A. and Bonev, S.A. and Galli, G, Carbon under extreme conditions: Phase boundaries and electronic properties from first-principles theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.103, 1204 (2006)
link to article [pnas.org]
The second paragraph of the article [nature.com] in Nature Physics (subscription required) that this story is about mentions at least 11 other papers on theoretical calculations and experiments on the melting of diamond. So no, this is not in fact the first time that the melting of diamond has been studied. Indeed, the linked article itself refers to previous experiments at Sandia National Laboratory that melted diamond, but were unable to accurately determine the temperature and pressure.
This is truly impressive work by some very skilled scientists, but let's discuss it for what it is and not what it isn't.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Informative)
Using your figures:
116,000 short tons.
1 ft^3 = ~.5 short tons
(insert cup of coffee here)
232,000 ft^3
Re:Much as I'd love to make a great pun about uran (Score:3, Informative)
Thats easy:
Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.
Re:can't you just make a diamond in the lab? (Score:1, Informative)
Synthetic diamonds are for the most part, industrial grade which tends to be opaque unlike gem quality natural diamonds which are transparent, contain Nitrogen and don't fluoresce under UV like synthetic diamonds generally do.
from wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
About a third of all diamonds will glow under ultraviolet light, usually a blue color which may be noticeable under a black light or strong sunlight. According to the GIA, who reviewed a random sample of 26,010 natural diamonds, 65% of the diamonds in the sample had no fluorescence. Of the 35% that did have fluorescence, 97% had blue fluorescence of which 38% had faint blue fluorescence and 62% had fluorescence that ranged from medium to very strong blue.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:1, Informative)
Diamond Nexus Labs has an online store for lab grown diamonds. I got one for my fiancee and thankfully (she is a nerd) she loves it more than a slave diamond. http://www.diamondnexuslabs.com/
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:2, Informative)
http://xkcd.com/681/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Much as I'd love to make a great pun about uran (Score:3, Informative)
Thats easy:
Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.
About four times as hard. KE=1/2 m v^2