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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.
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.
- 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
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
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.
For my girlfriend to get her diamond gift from me, she had to do the same.
Blow...very hard rock...
At least the journalist on this piece didn't tell us how much the star weighed using the IEEE international standard of Volkswagen Beetles.
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.