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.'
Lucy in the sky with diamonds (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Lucy in the sky with diamonds (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Diamond rain / Some stay dry and others feel the pain;
*I move away from the Mic to choke on hydrocarbons.
Re: Lucy in the sky with diamonds (Score:2)
Maybe so but thankfully the rest of us don't have to click it.
Re: (Score:2)
No, wait, that's on Europa.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and actually that someone was TFA, which begins:
“Picture yourself in a boat on a river” And make it a river of liquid hydrogen and helium deep within the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.
Obligatory Bond quote. (Score:5, Funny)
James, how the hell do we get those diamonds down again?
Re:Obligatory Bond quote. (Score:5, Funny)
007 isn't, but the word 'Obligatory' is.
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot the obligatory disclaimer.
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Who has ever heard of a Liquid Crystal? Imagine if you could use them to make a Display.
Re: (Score:2)
Clarke's books (Score:2)
And some guy goes hunting for a piece of it in 2061
That got blown out to Europa when they (the monoliths) blew up the planet
Re:Liquid diamond!? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia begs to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal [wikipedia.org]
sucks to be a dumbass jerk, doesn't it (Score:2)
It sucks to be wrong when you're being a jerk, doesn't it.
Rule 1: don't be a jerk when you might be wrong.
Rule 2: you can always be wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
But what if you're wrong that I could be wrong?
rule #3 (Score:2)
Rule 1: don't be a jerk when you might be wrong.
Rule 2: you can always be wrong.
Rule 3: raymorris is never wrong (note rule 2 says YOU can be wrong, not me).
Hmm, come to think of it, I WAS wrong when I said Clinton didn't barricade open air monuments.
My point, that such shenanigans are a new form of BS by democrats, was correct, though. Perhaps we need rule #4:
Rule 4: If it appears that raymorris is wrong, look at the bigger picture. He's always right about the big picture.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Liquid diamond!? (Score:4, Insightful)
If this story was on the internet 150 years ago, they would have been excited about the oceans of liquid coal.
A practically limitless supply of coal, essential for rail transport and industry, we just need to build a 1.2 terameter long pipeline...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Now I ain't saying she a liquid gold digger ... (Score:2)
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:4, Informative)
It also remains far over valued versus its industrial use. This means we are limiting its use so that goldbugs can hoard it. Not much better than a cartel.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It [gold] also remains far over valued versus its industrial use
so does paper with funny symbols, old dude's faces and a signature printed on it.
Re: (Score:3)
But the same paper without does not, so we can freely use that for industrial use.
See the difference?
Re: (Score:3)
Given that their "industrial use" is to be traded for goods and services, they seem to be valued quite exactly according to their industrial use.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I think he was talking about the paper bits.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even with all 4Cs without the cartel prices would drop like mad. They are limiting the supply in an artificial manner.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I do hate chickens, but I am not bothered by discussing it or them. I am not afraid of them. I am surprised you are this dedicated though. Dancy my monkey, dance, post for my amusement.
High quality diamonds are not that rare now that we can make them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Is there a cartel on Saturn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Color, Clarity, Cut, and Carat. It's the right combination of all four that makes a diamond valuable. This is regardless of the cartel. Quality is quality.
Not true. A "cultured" diamond will sell for considerably less than a mined diamond of the same quality. The DeBeers diamond cartel has gone to considerable effort and expense to promote the perception that laboratory grown diamonds are somehow inferior to "real" diamonds produced by African children digging up hundreds of tons of dirt.
Prices of man-made diamonds (Score:4, Informative)
A "cultured" diamond will sell for considerably less than a mined diamond of the same quality.
I was quite interested in purchasing a synthetic diamond a few years ago, and kept an eye on what the major US players (D.NEA, Gemesis, and Apollo Diamond) were doing.
While the prices of fancy colors (blue, yellow) were much less than colored natural diamonds, I found that (at that time, at least), the prices of colorless synthetic diamonds were about the same or even higher than natural diamonds.
Synthetic colorless diamonds were apparently harder to produce, since color is caused by impurities. The sizes were also relatively limited, e.g., it was hard to find anything higher than 0.5 ct.
Things may have changed since then, though.
Re: (Score:3)
Five C's determine their value, mostly weighted by Cartel.
Re: (Score:2)
Industrial diamonds cannot be made in large, flawless sizes. But there aren't any industrial uses for large sizes, either. So the availability of industrial diamond has little impact on the gemstone industry.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
DeBeers! (Score:2)
At least this should help fund space programs and work on asteroid capture. A bit sad that it will be used to adjust Saturn's orbit into the Sun but hey...progress right?
Re: (Score:2)
Greed and ambition have always been engines for progress.
Re: (Score:2)
and entertainment, I know I wont live to see it, but I have faith the Darwin Awards will long survive me, and be there to bring future people's the stories of idiots managing to remove themselves from the gene pool in hare brained schemes to get at those Saturn diamonds.
Re: (Score:2)
You say they are the engines for progress, but quite often, they are the roadblocks as well.
wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Correction:
"temperature and pressure are so concentrated that carbon becomes a liquid"
It's not considered a diamond if it's a liquid. Diamonds are crystalline.
Re: (Score:2)
So ice does not become a liquid?
Re: (Score:3)
If it's not a solid we call it water or steam. But remember that Steam is only available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not considered a diamond if it's a liquid. Diamonds are crystalline.
Aye, which is why they use the word "becomes." I.e. it changes from one thing (diamond) into another (liquid carbon). When something becomes something else, it often does not stay the first thing (sometimes it does, sometimes it does). Both sentences are valid: the first is just more specific (and therefore superior), as it tells you what form the carbon was in prior to becoming a liquid, while the second does not.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
How can you have different phases of liquid?
Supercooled region
Compressible region
Incompressible region
Supercritical region
It gets really weird at extreme temperatures and pressures. Solids don't get to have all the fun.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Liquid diamonds" would be free carbon atoms
Perhaps. It doesn't seem impossible to me that you could have the diamond allotrope, but on a sufficiently small scale that the result still behaves like a liquid. All of this is far beyond my knowledge, though.
Liquid carbon (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the diamond precipitation would be more properly called a hailstorm.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. I also wonder about the "in Saturn" vs. "on Saturn" phrasing. With a gas giant, where do you draw the line between "in" and "on"??
Re: (Score:3)
With a gas giant, where do you draw the line between "in" and "on"??
I don't think people even agree at this point about the interior of a gas giant. Best I can make out, it's likely a plasma that's squeezed so tight it behaves like a solid, but with its electrons floating all over the place, so not at all like any solid we've encountered.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Probably, but depending on how it falls, it might also be diamond hail.
Re:Liquid carbon (Score:4, Informative)
It depends - many scientists are fairly certain Neptune and Urectum (oh wait, it's still Uranus until 2620) have solid cores, so you can almost certainly land "on" those planets (ignoring pressure issues). Saturn and Jupiter are also thought to have rocky cores, or to have had them originally, but it is uncertain. It's entirely possible due to gravitational pressures and electrical current the cores are not really a solid nor a liquid but an ultra-dense plasma. The idea that the gas giants in our solar system possess (or possessed) solid cores is a fairly new theory based on data (gravitational, magnetic, and radar) gathered by various probes as well as mathematical predictions.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
on the other hand, many (most?) people don't actually know that diamond is just a particular crystalline form of pure carbon, like graphite, etc. This is sad, yes, but so it goes. So in order to convey the liquid nature at certain depths, they may have said "liquid diamond" just to keep in line with what they were talking about earlier with diamond chunks floating around.
Or, they could just be talking out of their ass.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I'll be reading xkcd on Tuesdays [xkcd.com] for the next few weeks to find out...
Re: (Score:2)
Titanium Carbide.
The next mission to Saturn (Score:2)
Will be funded by Zales.
oblig (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Adam and Eve were ashamed of Uranus.
Re: (Score:2)
Then I guess Jupiter was the result of the wild bachelor party before he put the ring on Saturn.
Re: (Score:2)
good news for space exploration (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing prompts exploration like greed.
Re: (Score:2)
Bad news for the explorers. De Beers has hired gunmen to shoot anyone who goes near Jupiter.
Re: (Score:2)
Gold has a lot of industrial uses, I could see it being worth bringing back.. maybe I'm wrong though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't have to heat shield things. If you're just recovering raw material and you have a lot of it, you can just write-off the mass you lose on re-entry as a cost of recovery.
Re: (Score:2)
Weather report for: Greater Metropolitan Saturn (Score:2, Funny)
Typical. Another example of how Slashdot's been going downhill for years: Now they're just giving weather reports. Who the hell goes to Saturn, anyway?
I mean, I've got friends upstate who vacation in Iowa for who knows what reason, so that's sort of the same thing, but they don't bother checking the weather before they go anymore.
Cool ... (Score:3)
This is awesome. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover there's some really cool (and weird) shit out there.
Raining diamonds. I can only imagine what other wacky stuff is out there we'll never know about.
Like some moon with seas made of the finest quality single-malt scotch. :-P
Re:Cool ... (Score:5, Informative)
no scotch found yet, but would you settle for vodka?
http://io9.com/5911365/how-alcohol-is-formed-naturally-in-space [io9.com]
Re: (Score:2)
This is awesome. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover there's some really cool (and weird) shit out there.
Raining diamonds. I can only imagine what other wacky stuff is out there we'll never know about.
True, and yet speculation about such things isn't entirely new. In Clarke's "2061" he writes about a diamond core on one of Jupiter's moons. And in a Heinlein story about going to the moon an astronaut is given a bag of diamonds so that he can fake their presence in order to spur interest in future moon trips, only to return and tell the person behind the hoax it's not a fake, diamonds really are littered all over the moon.
I'm sort of disappointed nobody else has mentioned this yet. C'mon slashdot, I though
More concerned (Score:2)
Extremeophiles (Score:2)
BS nonsense (Score:2)
Missing gemstone world (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
It's not like we're going to start sending ships to Saturn to get them and bring them back. What makes a diamond valuable is its rarity on Earth.
Suddenly having access to a literal ocean of them might impact that value.
Liquid diamond (Score:2)
Re:Diamonds aren't rare at all. (Score:5, Informative)
That someone is De Beers. That company basically *is* the international diamond market.
Smallish diamonds aren't that rare, no. The price is kept artificially high. The ridiculously huge ones are, though. The ones only affordable by royalty and the mega-rich. Still, if they want to spend their wealth buying pieces of shiny rock, let them.
Re: (Score:2)
Also reselling "used" diamonds is apparently very difficult which keeps the price high. There are companies that will buy grandma's old wedding ring but the price is generally very lousy. It's all marketing plus a firm lock on the market.
Re: (Score:3)
Not entirely true. Large diamonds with few or no flaws are fairly rare on earth. Small diamonds, not so much. This is why small diamonds ( .2 carat) are pretty cheap.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks Sheldon.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, not forever, diamond is just transparent coal, it'll burn away to nothing in a hot enough fire.
Ssssshhhhhh! Don't spoil the industry's carefully nurtured romantic image.
Also, please don't spoil the manufactured illusion that diamonds are rare and valuable [theatlantic.com] which you'll soon find some problems with if you try to sell a gem-grade diamond for anything like the price you paid for it [theatlantic.com].
Basically, the modern diamond industry is a scam designed to promote the illusion of value and scarcity around diamonds, and has been since mass diamond mines emerged in the late 19th century and the owners formed the De Beers cartel to promote their own self interest.
So, if these diamonds on Saturn were somehow accessible to us... well, yeah, diamond would become a lot less valuable. But it's not like they're actually *that* rare or valuable just now.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you mean De Beers is launching a space program...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well that's just great - let's fill up a large spaceship and send them all there, I'd say!
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.