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Uranus and Neptune May Have "Oceans of Diamonds"
Third Position writes "Oceans of liquid diamond topped with solid 'icebergs' of the precious gems could be on Uranus and Neptune. The first-ever detailed research into the melting point of diamond found it behaves like water during melting and freezing — with its solid form floating on the liquid. A large diamond ocean on one or both of the planets could provide an explanation for an oddity they both share: unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles." The article doesn't mention what the pressures might be like in these outer-planets environments, but the researchers found that liquefying diamond requires 40 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.
I'd like to let everyone know that Mars is full of gold just under the crust, and every planet around Proxima Centauri is rich with uranium.
Get that space program moving.
detailed research into the melting point of diamond found it behaves like water during melting and freezing -- with its solid form floating on the liquid
I only point this out because you would be surprised at how many human beings don't know this, but for it to float to the top, that means its frozen state is less dense, hence expands, when freezes. Almost nothing else does this.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Might be worth the cost of shipping if it did away with the diamond industry once and for all! Of course, what with marketing, De Beers would probably buy up the stock from Uranus and either dump it in the ocean, or sell it at 500% the price of normal diamonds as "space diamonds... the most romantic diamond yet. Shit that's been floating on the seas of Uranus for millions of years can now be on your hand - FOREVER."
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
40 million atmospheres is the kind of pressure that you'd measure under 400 million meters (400,000km) of material at a density of 1 g/cm^3 at a constant 1 g. Uranus and Neptune's gravity field is near 1g give or take and the density is not much more than 1g/cm^3 so the pressure in the core can not be 40 million atmospheres as there isn't ~400,000 km of material sitting above the core. Given that Uranus has a radius of ~25,000 km, density of ~1.27 g/cm^3, surface gravity of 8.7 m/s^2 and that the gravity field drops off roughly linearly with depth, the pressure is probably about a tenth of what TFA says diamond started to melt. Either someone dropped a zero where it didn't belong or Diamond isn't fluid in these planets' cores.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I wonder why the headline isn't
Uranus and Neptune May Have "Oceans of melted coal"
"diamond" is by definition a solid crystalline form of carbon. If you melt it, it is by definition not diamond anymore.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Though if it would be possible to mine this form of coal in industrial quantities, it could suddenly become useful as a mineral... (yes, I know diamonds are useful already - but those are usually small amounts of manufactured ones). There's even one book by Stephenson more or less about it. And hey, you have whole moon out there full of hydrocarbons, in quantities many times greater than deposits on Earth.
Is it impractical now? Hell yeah. Will it always be? I don't know. But I'm sure many people would laugh at you only few thousand years ago for suggesting that dark rocks can be used as a source of energy. A thousands years ago for suggesting the same with whale oil on industrial scale. 200 years ago with that black oily substance seeping from the ground here and there. Rocks from which people get mysteriously sick used for power generation and most powerful explosives? Tapping the power of a volcano? Splitting water to get to the Moon? That's insane!
One that hath name thou can not otter
Yellow synthetic diamonds (nitrogen impurity) are easy to make, comparatively, and form the basis of a lot of the industrial uses. However, vapour deposition techniques are quite capable of making blue (with boron) or colourless synthetic diamonds that are visually indistinguishable from a pure volcanic diamond.
In fact the only way to distinguish them is to do a chemical analysis (eg with UV light) and compare the result against the impurities listed in volcanic diamonds from all the known mines.