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Diamond Rain In Saturn
Taco Cowboy writes "Back in 1999, it was postulated that diamonds may rain from the sky in the atmospheres of our solar system's gas giants. Now, research has shown that diamond rains on Saturn are more than probable. '"We don't want to give people the impression that we have a Titanic-sized diamondberg floating around," said researcher Mona Delitsky, of California Specialty Engineering, "We're thinking they're more like something you can hold in your hand." Recent data compiled by planetary scientists ... has been combined with newly published pressure temperature diagrams of Jupiter and Saturn. These diagrams, known as adiabats, allow researchers to decipher at what interior level that diamond would become stable. They also allow for calculations at lower levels – regions where both temperature and pressure are so concentrated that diamond becomes a liquid. Imagine diamond rain or rivulets of pure gemstone.' 'At even greater depths, the scientists say the diamond will eventually melt to form liquid diamond, which may then form a stable ocean layer.'
Sorry, someone has to say it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDl0qPfkSRw
James, how the hell do we get those diamonds down again?
What is that supposed to be when diamond is defined as a crystalline form of carbon and a crystalline material is by definition a solid?
Is there a cartel on Saturn? Because, you know, that's the only thing that really makes them special. This is something the goldbugs have right. Diamonds? You can make them out of carbon, via chemistry. Gold? You need nuclear processes that are currently uneconomical. Barring some spectacular breakthrough in nuclear technology, the supply of gold remains limited.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"temperature and pressure are so concentrated that diamond becomes a liquid"
Correction:
"temperature and pressure are so concentrated that carbon becomes a liquid"
It's not considered a diamond if it's a liquid. Diamonds are crystalline.
Aren't they essentially saying there might be oceans of carbon, but using diamond to make better headlines?
Then god created Saturn, and he liked it, so he put a ring on it.
Nothing prompts exploration like greed.
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That someone is De Beers. That company basically *is* the international diamond market.
Smallish diamonds aren't that rare, no. The price is kept artificially high. The ridiculously huge ones are, though. The ones only affordable by royalty and the mega-rich. Still, if they want to spend their wealth buying pieces of shiny rock, let them.
Not entirely true. Large diamonds with few or no flaws are fairly rare on earth. Small diamonds, not so much. This is why small diamonds ( .2 carat) are pretty cheap.
Typical. Another example of how Slashdot's been going downhill for years: Now they're just giving weather reports. Who the hell goes to Saturn, anyway?
I mean, I've got friends upstate who vacation in Iowa for who knows what reason, so that's sort of the same thing, but they don't bother checking the weather before they go anymore.
This is awesome. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover there's some really cool (and weird) shit out there.
Raining diamonds. I can only imagine what other wacky stuff is out there we'll never know about.
Like some moon with seas made of the finest quality single-malt scotch. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, diamonds *are* forever.
No. De Beers is launching an anti-space program. Their job is to restrict supply, they already have what they need.
Nope, not forever, diamond is just transparent coal, it'll burn away to nothing in a hot enough fire.
Ssssshhhhhh! Don't spoil the industry's carefully nurtured romantic image.
Also, please don't spoil the manufactured illusion that diamonds are rare and valuable which you'll soon find some problems with if you try to sell a gem-grade diamond for anything like the price you paid for it.
Basically, the modern diamond industry is a scam designed to promote the illusion of value and scarcity around diamonds, and has been since mass diamond mines emerged in the late 19th century and the owners formed the De Beers cartel to promote their own self interest.
So, if these diamonds on Saturn were somehow accessible to us... well, yeah, diamond would become a lot less valuable. But it's not like they're actually *that* rare or valuable just now.
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A "cultured" diamond will sell for considerably less than a mined diamond of the same quality.
I was quite interested in purchasing a synthetic diamond a few years ago, and kept an eye on what the major US players (D.NEA, Gemesis, and Apollo Diamond) were doing.
While the prices of fancy colors (blue, yellow) were much less than colored natural diamonds, I found that (at that time, at least), the prices of colorless synthetic diamonds were about the same or even higher than natural diamonds.
Synthetic colorless diamonds were apparently harder to produce, since color is caused by impurities. The sizes were also relatively limited, e.g., it was hard to find anything higher than 0.5 ct.
Things may have changed since then, though.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.
Neither does rampant misogyny.
It's interesting that you point all the fault of the paper at one "brainless female," when the paper had 11 authors, 7 of which were male, including her post-doctoral adviser, Dr. Ronald Oremland, who is a noted expert on the metabolization of toxic elements. Dr. Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the paper, but it could not (or at least should not) have gone forward with those 10 other names without each of them approving. And if any of them were so much smarter and better than someone "only employed for reasons of political correctness, then why did all of them sign onto the "rebuttal" paper in response to criticisms of the original paper? Why does only she get the blame for this and none of them, and where do you get the notion that all of these people worked under her (much less were forced to do so for political reasons)?
One would also suspect, given her list of published papers on biochemistry, that she knows a wee bit more about chemistry than some AC blowhard on Slashdot, despite having been very wrong about GFAJ-1. The ability of arsenic to substitute imperfectly for phosphorus is in fact the very reason it's toxic. It's not impossible that there would be some biological use for arsenic, though it seems highly unlikely given the relative abundance of the two elements and the havoc that arsenic causes because of its similarity. The follow-up research in the wake of this is proving fascinating. At the very least, she's kicked off a whole new interest in arsenic biochemistry.
So, while you pat yourself on the back on your true "scientific understanding," it's clear that you haven't done ANY real research on this subject matter and are just relying on snap judgments -- not surprising considering the sheer hatred you seem to be able to call up for an entire gender. Speaking of which...
It turns out that the liquid state of carbon is mostly an unknown due to the temperatures and pressures required, but there's been a recent consensus that it acts very differently at "low" and high pressures. Computer simulations and experiments have suggested that under high pressures, carbon orders itself into an irregular but still recognizably diamond-like structure with four neighbors for each atom. In fact, high pressures make the formation of solid diamond when the liquid cools more likely as a result. At low pressures, it's more like graphene or strings of carbon, with bonding to neighbors in 2's & 3's instead of 4's. At even higher pressures it develops into a metallic structure. So the term "liquid diamond" actually has significant meaning and isn't just media buzzwords.
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