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The Galaxy's Largest Diamond
unassimilatible writes "The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports 'to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond.' A newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros. A cheesy, unrealistic simulation is also available. AP has a story as well."
DeBeers has announced their official entry into the X-prize competition...
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Sadly DeBeers has already posted one poor volunteer from South Africa to sit on it until it gets close enough to rope in.
mitch
Is the high resolution image for the women?
Great, now I have to haul my ass all the way to where?
This getting married thing is getting more and more complicated each year.
--Thei Antispamist A useless endevor that will cer
When the hell are news outlets going to hire writers that at least understand science somewhat and won't dumb it down so far that it becomes just another fluff story next to the one about the cute puppies? Granted, it's cool that scientists can confirm a hunk of crystallized carbon that large, but give me a friggin break....
My understanding is that the vast majority of a diamond's "sparkle" is the result of careful cutting and controlling where the light enters the diamond. Slicing through an otherwise uncut diamond would not be too impressive, I'd imagine. Especially considering the lack of a strong light source.
Maybe a more worthwhile story would be on the fact that the entire diamond industry is created by incredibly strict control of the supply, which is kept artificially low to dramatically inflate price. If people knew, and accepted, the truth this wouldn't be considered that much more special than the fact that some other planets are just big, big versions of rocks. Gasp!
on closer inspection it is revealed to be cubic zirconium which drastically reduces it value at the local pawn shop.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
All it takes is blue spandex, a cape, and a wry grin given to an amazed coal worker.
Phrases like '5 million trillion trillion" are silly. They should put the number's real name, write it out in digits, and-or use scientific notation (or a variant like C-style "e notation"). It ticks me off -- the magnitude is already so large that it's incredibly hard to visualize, so they should put it in the clearest format possible. Do people say "there are sixty hundred hundred hundred hundred people alive on earth"? No, of course not, they say "six billion" or "6,000,000,000". If the people printing this assume that no one knows the words for numbers above a trillion, they could at least use the semi-easily-parsed "followed by n zeros" format consistently.
It wouldn't matter if someone went up and brought the diamond back. As soon as you send it to the jewelers to be mapped and evaluated, they'll just swap it out for another, lesser quality, diamond without you even knowing.
I say leave it in place. We could shave off the first 30 miles of top layer and shine a giant laser at it for the largest intergalactic network ever known to man. Since it would take light 50 years to travel to the planet, Half-Life 2 should be just about ready to play by then.It's a white dwarf, the diamond would be sorrounded by plasma and gas.
I hear that Tau Ceti is bragging that they bought a larger one.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
So, don't overpay for it, no matter what the salesman says about size mattering...
TSG
- The universe's largest collection of AOL CDs, approximately a terragoogle of them circling Saturn in the form of one of its rings. Results of failed marketing campaign circa 2501ad.
- A twenty-billion tonne meteor shaped exactly like the Hand of God, heading straight for Ur^h^h the planet Earth.
- Life on Mars, complete with funky trance tunes and dayglo noserings.
- A bong the size of NYC, containing twenty billion tonnes of a material that under examination appears to be chemically identical to Tunisian purple haze. Said bong is orbiting the Sun quite close to Mars and already the petition to send a manned mission to Mars has collected five hundred and thirty million signatures. Most of them say, "send me, send me!" Others just say, "Dude, that's too much!"
- A radio beacon embedded in the heart of a small black rock circling one of Pluto's moon. After the rock is detected and retrieved in 2032 at incredible expense, and cracked open following ten years of drilling, it is found to contain a copy of MAD Magazine from circa 1972 and a small piece of paper with the words "regular delivery to this address, please" on it.
- The discovery, in a deep crater on Mars, of an underground passage leading to a huge room filled with silent, brooding machines. After long study and careful analysis of the patterns and markings, we activate one of the machines. Immediately the whole room comes to life and a small black hole appears in its center. The Martian surface starts to slide into the black hole, then the entire planet, and finally the whole Solar System. A team of two plutonaughts watch the scene from the far boundaries of the Plutonian orbit, and as the last specks are absorbed into the now huge and pulsating black hole, they read, in huge flashing letters, the text "ZIPPING COMPLETE. NOW REFORMATTING MEDIA... 1% COMPLETE, PLEASE WAIT."
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This puts another spin on the phrase "reaching the stars for HER" right?
"Wireless : LAN
Sort of. Stars will fuse elements into heavier and heavier elements, up to iron (since making heavier elements actually takes energy, any larger atoms are made in negligable quantities outside of supernovas).
Anyway, my (educated) guess would be that this given star had enough mass to fuse elements up to carbon, but not further - not enough to sustain its continued existance as a 'star', anyway.
At least, I'm inferring from the article that this star is fast becoming a 'black dwarf' - I could be wrong and this is just a white dwarf in its carbon stage, but by that measure there would certainly be far, far larger diamonds out there (and in great numbers).
I am a science fantasy fan
Well, if you stop reading slashdot maybe your computer won't notice. :)
I remember reading that in 2010: Odyssey Two. In the book, there's a diamond the size of earth at it's core.
hate titty pee colon slash slash
Diamonds -- Are they really worth the cost?.
Rank Presidents by th
Gold and diamonds have industrial uses as conductors and abrasives. While having a large amount of either would depress the commodity markets (and send many speculators to the depths of dispair) it would bolster the industries that utilize these items for manufacturing.
Imagine if gold were cheaper than lead - we could market environmentally friendly "lead-free" ammunition. If we had access to diamond sheets large enough, perhaps we could construct windows out of it. Instead of copper wiring, we'd have gold wiring instead. Circuit boards would be plated with gold, and maybe we'd see the return of $20 gold coins that are actually worth $20.
What would REALLY be valuable would be catalytic elements like platinum or palladium. Bring back enough of those and whole new industries could be built around them...
Gravitatotional Force
Fg = G * m1 * m2 * r^-2
Gravitational Acceleration Fg/m2
Ag = G *m1 * r^-2
G = 6.67E-11
m1= 5 million trillion trillion lbs = 5 * 10^6 * 10^12 * 10^12 lbs= 5E30 lbs *(1kg/2.2lbs) = 2.26E30 kg
r = diameter of 2500mi/2 = 1250mi * (1609 m/mi) = 2011680 meters
Ag= 6.67E-11 * 2.26E30kg * (2011680m)^-2 = 37,249,159.4 m/s^2
Ag = (37,249,159.4 m/s^2)/(9.8 m/s^2)= 3,800,934.63 g's
3.8 million times earth gravity?
Unless there was some mistake in the way they described the mass (million billion trillion) that seems pretty rough right?
again correct me if i was wrong.
It's a conflict diamond - from a war a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
According to Google Calculator, this diamond has ~ 330,000 times the mass of the planet earth.
Uh no... no diamond at the core of Jupiter... there is still some question about rocky, heavy metal, or metalic hydrogen at the core...
In any of those cases, the state of matter at jupiter's core would be pretty exotic stuff, even a diamond at those temperatures and pressures would flow like water...
And no, jupiter was never large enough to have sustained fusion, though it does emit a whole lotta heat and readio waves.
Genda Bendte
For my girlfriend to get her diamond gift from me, she had to do the same.
Blow...very hard rock...
The poster is a well-known troll: look at his history. Please mod the jerk into oblivion.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0402046
Second, nowhere in the paper is there any mention of "diamond". Crystallized carbon can also be in graphite form, so it might actually be a very large pencil lead...
..diamond would be as cheap as sand... Diamonds already are worth about as much as sand, except that de Beers has pretty much all of them, and they charge what they like...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Can someone please tell me how a huge chunk of carbon (even one that big) can be detected from 50 light-years away?
Jealousy. If there's a bigger diamond out there, someone's girlfriend/wife is sure to find out/know about it. "Hrmph. Well, I guess it's nice, but I hear Centaraus has a 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond!"
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
That's true, the majority of its mass is hydrogen. But you're forgetting just how friggin' massive Jupiter is. Even if only a tiny tiny fraction of a percent were a diamond, it'd still be huge!
Part of Clarke's explanation for this theory (in "2061", actually) explained that Jupiter's high gravity would cause the more massive molecules -- like methane, which Jupiter definitely has in quantity -- would sink through the atmosphere towards the core. And at the core, the intense pressures would separate the carbon from the hydrogen (in the methane), and the hydrogen would waft back up (being of lesser mass), while the carbon would stay in the core.
Think of it as being like a black hole, except without the extreme singularity -- instead of being compressed to a single point, it's being compressed into a diamond. (But it's not just the gravity doing this, it's also the intense atmospheric pressure of all the gasses sitting above the core, too.)
Anyone who knows diamonds would know they look like a friggin light colored rock. The facets shown in the diagram are a result of careful cutting and polishing. Something that doesn't happen in a galaxy far far away.
The lifetime of the star (and the elements that it ends up fusing to sustain that lifetime) are determined only by the initial mass of the star. Most stars are low mass stars (it's easier to form smaller clumps of gas), and these stars take a long time to run out of their hydrogen supply (in fact the least massive of these still haven't run out, and won't for several billion years).
As stars run out of hydrogen, they start fusing other elements present in their cores. This takes them through different stages of stellar evolution (red giant, horizontal branch stars, assymptotic branch stars, etc.) They continue to gain energy from this process until they reach iron. When these stars fuse elements heavier than iron, they don't actually get a net energy output from the reaction and thus their pressure source (fusion) cannot sustain the equilibrium against the gravitational force that constantly tries to collapse them. This is when a supernovae event occurs. As the star collapses under its own gravitation, the core rapidly fuses anything it can as the density increases. This is why the previous poster is right in saying that the main source for elements heavier than iron in the universe is supernovae.
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
http://www.gemesis.com/home.htm
They're selling yellow diamonds. I thought the Russians had a process years ago for adding some metal to the stew that hoovered up the nitrogen that caused the yellow color, producing clear diamonds.
I'm with the Slashdotter who said that even at the same price, he'd prefer to own or give a jewel embodying human science, engineering, ingenuity and cooperation rather than one dug out of the ground in an armed camp. My wife feels the same way. If I had to have a natural diamond I'd wait for a Martian one.