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."

Comments

Scientific American has lost credibility

[rellort]

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.

Neutron star != diamond

[caffeinated_bunsen]

The title of 'diamond' is highly suspect. Matter at the middle of a neutron star doesn't even bother forming nuclei, much less atoms or crystals. What they're saying is that the quark soup in a neutron star was previously thought to contain a few electrons mixed in, which would absorb light. It now seems that strange quarks are more stable in that environment than previously thought, which eliminates the requirements for electrons in that area. The result is a whole hell of a lot of mass in a small volume that doesn't interact with light all that much. So if you managed to isolate the core of a neutron star (completely impossible), without changing its optical properties (even more impossible), you'd have a transparent object the size of a small city, weighing as much as a small star.

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.