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Neutron Stars May Have Diamond Cores
Waffle Iron writes: "This article at Scientific American postulates that neutron stars may contain a quark mixture that resembles a transparent diamond instead of the metal-like mixture assumed up to now. I wonder what it would look like inside, given that the light rays would be bent into strange paths by the intense gravity. Maybe it just doesn't matter, because this is one place that nobody will ever get to see."
My understanding as an advanced Student of physics is that the characteristic length scales at which quarks are bound and their "intrinisic" (rest mass energy wavelength) size make then highly unlikely to "vibrate" in the comparably much larger (6+ orders of magnitude) range of visible light, and thus they won't absorb of emit visible light to any significant degree.
I too started noticing SciAm getting all "wired" on us about 3 years ago and have since watched it get progressively worse. It's really a shame.
It started long before that. Ad pages began dropping in the 70s and continued in the 80s. Since ad pages is a decent measure of the profitability of a magazine, I thought SciAm was a goner. They've retooled the look of the magazine and some of the content and their readership has gone back up. Sure I preferred the old SciAm, but the magazine was dying.
These days, you tend to get more articles written by science journalists and not as many by the researchers themselves. On the other had, it used to be the case that I could read and understand an average of two complete articles a month. Now that average has gone up significantly. I still learn new science from SciAm, but it is not the same magazine that it once was.
Face it. There just wasn't a big enough market for the old Scientific American.
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Although it might be in crystalline form, neutronium is a substance made of pure neutrons ...
At the gravity/density found in neutron stars protons and electrons are squeezed together creating neutrons. Ordinary matter, a proton/neutron nucleus orbited by a cloud of electrons, ceases to exist.
As I recall, one tablespoon of this "diamond" would weigh as much as Manhattan Island. :)
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are considerably more likely to have cores of diamond because they are hot, pressure is very high, and the chemical component for diamond is in abundance -- carbon. The core conditions of these worlds don't come anywhere close to the conditions found in a neutron star because a neutron star is not ultimately made by the kind of process which forms planets. Planets do not have gravity capable of overcoming the repulsive force (strong nuclear force, I do not remember the term?) that exists between positive and negative atomic particles. As far as we know any one trillion ton teaspoon of neutronium is the same as another trillion ton teaspoon of neutronium, precluding anything resembling chemistry.
I *AM* somewhat curious as to the hardness of neutronium. I suspect there would be no way of measuring it, but then again artificially producing it would probably prove extremely difficult, if not impossible.
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I used to love reading scientific american in the 80's but by the mid-90s they have been Discoverized and had dumbed down their articles and the magazine was mostly ads. I was lucky to get a gift subscription to 'Science News' a couple of years ago for Christmas and have been a subscriber ever since - it's a fantastic science weekly with a good content level - check it out at www.sciencenews.org --Vince
I don't blame them for selling out. Seems all serious science journals eventually go the route of pop science. How much money can you really make selling ad space for digital multimeters after all? At some point, you have to go a little mainstream and start selling space to General Motors.
You can't do that with articles that don't appeal to the general public. More specifically, the part of the general public who thinks they're several notches in intelligence above the "rest" of the general public.
So SciAm strokes their ego with headlines about diamond cores. Maybe they give them some nice sidebar explanations of the unfamiliar (to them) astronomy terms. It's stuff the quasi-average reader can relate to. At the same time, many of us long for the days when the magazine covered hard science. You know, the kind of stuff you didn't even try to grasp without a PhD.
So Scientific American is dead. Long live Scientific American.
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I too started noticing SciAm getting all "wired" on us about 3 years ago and have since watched it get progressively worse. It's really a shame.
SciAm used to be a refuge for what I had assumed to be the huge demographic of highly scientifically literate geeks who do NOT have doctorates in particle physics (IE. people like me). But, with reporting like this, that's just plain stinking with blatant scientific inaccuracies, it's too late it seems. You've gone the way of Discover and New Scientist, never to return to the pinnacle of respectable scientific journalism you once defined.
Time to let my subscription run out and get some Nature or Science in it's place.
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My thought was that the quarks in the neutron star, not being confined to a nucleus, would have sufficient freedom to absorb or emit longer wavelengths. But I guess that even though they exist a very large volume, each individual quark still has a fairly well determined position, and hence has widely separated energies.
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The fact that strange quarks may be more stable than previously thought under some circumstances is interesting. The fact that some portion of the middle of a neutron star is transparent is almost completely useless speculation. Ignoring that, there's still the problem that nothing in the article remotely resembles a diamond from a scientist's point of view.
What I'm not so sure about is why it is supposed to be transparent. I know that all macroscopic interaction we observe with light is through electrons, but I thought that was just because the nuclei take up too little space to be noticed. When you have a star core composed of quarks, even without electrons mixed in, I'd expect electromagentic interaction with the quarks themselves to prevent light from travelling any distance. Or are the quarks bound tightly enough that they can't absorb or emit visible wavelengths? IANANPY (I am not a nuclear physicist, yet), so I'm not so sure about that one.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I'd like to see the DeBeers' own that!
Keeping
Although I don't see why matter has to be "diamond-like" once it's been determined that it is not metallic. Why can't they just compare it to glass?
The Physical Review Letters article might be worth reading but the SciAm blurb is a badly misleading popularization. People are going to think neutron stars are made of ordinary carbon diamond- which is the worst possible impression to give. It's so bad it's not even wrong! Neutron stars are far more interesting than diamonds are. You would never find anything resembling ordinary matter (atoms, nuclei, shells, etc.) in a neutron star, or even in a white dwarf.
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Although the star's core would be neither solid nor crystal nor faceted, apparently it would reflect some light at its boundaries and otherwise resemble a diamond
So last I checked, we'd call that "carbon" right? I mean, if it's a big, non-crystaline chunk of carbon, it's not a diamond right? That's at least my understanding of what a diamond is....
This has been another useless post from....
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No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Yeah, that reminds me of the planet from "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" whose "core" created planets. They must have made these nuetron stars as defense against space pirates. Maybe not but its worth pondering.
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