Diamond Rain In Saturn 177
Taco Cowboy writes "Back in 1999, it was postulated that diamonds may rain from the sky in the atmospheres of our solar system's gas giants. Now, research has shown that diamond rains on Saturn are more than probable. '"We don't want to give people the impression that we have a Titanic-sized diamondberg floating around," said researcher Mona Delitsky, of California Specialty Engineering, "We're thinking they're more like something you can hold in your hand." Recent data compiled by planetary scientists ... has been combined with newly published pressure temperature diagrams of Jupiter and Saturn. These diagrams, known as adiabats, allow researchers to decipher at what interior level that diamond would become stable. They also allow for calculations at lower levels – regions where both temperature and pressure are so concentrated that diamond becomes a liquid. Imagine diamond rain or rivulets of pure gemstone.' 'At even greater depths, the scientists say the diamond will eventually melt to form liquid diamond, which may then form a stable ocean layer.'
Liquid diamond!? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is that supposed to be when diamond is defined as a crystalline form of carbon and a crystalline material is by definition a solid?
Is there a cartel on Saturn? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a cartel on Saturn? Because, you know, that's the only thing that really makes them special. This is something the goldbugs have right. Diamonds? You can make them out of carbon, via chemistry. Gold? You need nuclear processes that are currently uneconomical. Barring some spectacular breakthrough in nuclear technology, the supply of gold remains limited.
Re:Is there a cartel on Saturn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Industrial diamonds cannot be made in large, flawless sizes.
The quality has improved in recent years. For some colored diamonds, lab grown diamonds are already superior.
But there aren't any industrial uses for large sizes, either.
Large diamonds have applications in optics. Diamonds have a high index of refraction, very low absorption of infrared light, and are easy to keep cool because of their very high thermal conductivity. This makes diamonds very useful for high powered IR optics, including CO2 lasers.
Re:Is there a cartel on Saturn? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is interest in using diamonds for LHC detectors, due to its superior radiation hardness compared to silicon.
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/april-2012/signal-to-background [symmetrymagazine.org]
If diamond was as cheep as silicon, then they would be using tonnes of it.
Re:Liquid carbon (Score:5, Interesting)
It's core is a mixture of rock and metallic hydrogen. So it's "surface" is basically a hydrogen ocean over top of a carbon sphere that's likely been compressed into a huge diamond. Keep in mind that it's been getting hit with asteroids for a very long time. It's clearly got some rock down there somewhere.
Misogyny and liquid diamonds. (Score:5, Interesting)
Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.
Neither does rampant misogyny.
It's interesting that you point all the fault of the paper at one "brainless female," when the paper had 11 authors, 7 of which were male, including her post-doctoral adviser, Dr. Ronald Oremland, [fieldofscience.com] who is a noted expert on the metabolization of toxic elements. Dr. Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the paper, but it could not (or at least should not) have gone forward with those 10 other names without each of them approving. And if any of them were so much smarter and better than someone "only employed for reasons of political correctness, then why did all of them sign onto the "rebuttal" paper in response to criticisms of the original paper? Why does only she get the blame for this and none of them, and where do you get the notion that all of these people worked under her (much less were forced to do so for political reasons)?
One would also suspect, given her list of published papers on biochemistry, [felisawolfesimon.com] that she knows a wee bit more about chemistry than some AC blowhard on Slashdot, despite having been very wrong about GFAJ-1. The ability of arsenic to substitute imperfectly for phosphorus is in fact the very reason it's toxic. It's not impossible that there would be some biological use for arsenic, though it seems highly unlikely given the relative abundance of the two elements and the havoc that arsenic causes because of its similarity. The follow-up research [acs.org] in the wake of this is proving fascinating. At the very least, she's kicked off a whole new interest in arsenic biochemistry.
So, while you pat yourself on the back on your true "scientific understanding," it's clear that you haven't done ANY real research on this subject matter and are just relying on snap judgments -- not surprising considering the sheer hatred you seem to be able to call up for an entire gender. Speaking of which...
It turns out that the liquid state of carbon is mostly an unknown due to the temperatures and pressures required, but there's been a recent consensus that it acts very differently at "low" and high pressures. Computer simulations and experiments have suggested that under high pressures, carbon orders itself into an irregular but still recognizably diamond-like structure with four neighbors for each atom. In fact, high pressures make the formation of solid diamond when the liquid cools more likely as a result. [arxiv.org] At low pressures, it's more like graphene or strings of carbon, with bonding to neighbors in 2's & 3's instead of 4's. At even higher pressures it develops into a metallic structure. So the term "liquid diamond" actually has significant meaning and isn't just media buzzwords.