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.