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Astronomers Discover Earth-Sized Diamond
ygslash (893445) writes Astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced that they have discovered what appears to be the coolest white dwarf ever detected. The white dwarf is formerly a star similar to our own sun which, after expending all of its fuel, has cooled to less than a chilly 3000 degrees Kelvin and contracted to a size approximately the same as Earth. A white dwarf is composed mostly of carbon and oxygen, and the astronomers believe that at that temperature it would be mostly crystallized, forming something like a huge diamond.
Lucy is here. I repeat, Lucy is here.
I discovered an upside down diamond in your moms pants. It wasn't Earth sized but your mom sure was! She made me look like a white dwarf!
Is really pissed
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Considering that the high price of diamonds is a combination of the De Beers monopoly together with their massive PR campaigns to a) make people use diamonds as formal symbols of affection and b) to make people unwilling to sell them second-hand once they've been owned, they should be worried. On the other hand, this is 900 light years away, so maybe they'll just lobby against any research into FTL travel.
n/t
Scintillate, Scintillate, Diminutive Stellar Orb,
How inexplicable to me it seems the stupendous problem of your existence.
Elevated at such an immeasurable distance in an apparently perpendicular direction from this terrestrial planet which we occupy,
Resembling in thy dazzling and unapproachable effulgence, a gem of purest carbon set solitaire in a university of space.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
That's all anybody really cares about at this point.
Isn't it supposed to just be "3000 Kelvin"?
not "degrees Kelvin"
Haul that thing back for Liz Taylor. Oh, wait.
From the article:
Kaplan and his colleagues found this stellar gem using the National Radio Astronomy Observatoryâ(TM)s (NRAO) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), as well as other observatories.
From wikipedia:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy Portfolio Review committee chaired by Daniel Eisenstein of Harvard University recommended in August 2012 that the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope should be defunded over a five year period.[9] Further information on this divestiture can be found on the AUI webpage and at www.savethegbt.org.
In the fiscal year 2014 budget, the US Congress did not recommend divesting the Green Bank Telescope. The Telescope is looking for partners to help fund its $10 million annual operating costs.
How do they go from crystalized carbonmonoxide to a diamond? The diamond crystal lattice is exceptionally strong and only atoms of nitrogen, boron and hydrogen can be introduced into diamond during the growth at significant concentrations (up to atomic percents).
If it's "mostly" oxygen and carbon it's not a diamond. That's simple chemistry.
Carbon + Oxygen @3000K = CO2. Diamond burns in the presence of oxygen at those kind of temperatures and pressures.
SSIA
Diamonds are almost entirely carbon, where as this has a significant portion of oxygen in it, so this wouldn't actually form a diamond structure. This sort of headline bait is rather annoying.
from the Sega CD version of Dungeon Explorer .(There's an obscure reference.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Lemme call a buddy of mine to see what he can tell me about this.
I wonder how many carats that is...
Is it just one diamond, or a pile of diamonds? If a pile, how [ir]regular?
I mean, in theory. I know we haven't been there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why buy her a diamond?
About 1.90644415 Ãf-- 10^19
You can't call dibs in a bidding war!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the desk of "If you liked it you should have put a ring on it"... comes the diamond for the ring.
Hoper Kanye doesn't see this.
Now all I need is a sun-sized gold band, and finally my girlfriend might be happy.
Sure, maybe by stellar object standards, that's quite cool.
But an object that's rocking out at nearly 5000F isn't something I'd classify as "chilly".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
De Beers to launch deep space rocket. Estimated cost? Two months salary.
Anyone up for a bus tour?
Russia announces it has developed a method to turn diamonds into energy with a 73% efficiency..
elsewhere...
NASA announces it has received substantial funding to get "Americans into space exploration"
Only way it's gonna happen....
Boeing Jet, in return. I always wanted one of those.
Assuming some day in the distant future humans could reach deep into space, could a really big diamond serve any functional purpose?
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
How much of a gravitational pull would there be on this object? Could you approach it closely or would that be a bad idea?
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
May the Quartz be with you. Really It has to be one of the most common minerals on earth. It just looks like a diamond.
Then make this a dibbing war!
Aren't those the things that cost a shitload of money that cash for gold stores can't do anything with?
Hey, y'all supposed to be nerds, geeks, and general fans of science, right?
You're all focusing on the material, and there's something much more important. Isn't it supposed to take TRILLIONS of years for a white dwarf to cool to such a low temperature? Either someone got the math wrong, or (as I've suspected for a while now,) the universe is a whole hell of a lot fucking older than the Big-Bangers think. I think of them as "Young-Universe" Cosmologists, I'm pretty sure the Big Bang Theory is not much more than a re-telling of the "Genesis" story, but with names and dates changed, and volition on the part of that which "created" everything removed.
Oh, and who's to say which allotrope of carbon it is? It could be not-diamond at all, but an earth-sized, very dirty Buckminster-fullerine. Guess that wouldn't be as sexy though. Anyway... I'm looking forward to the moment when they start studying this thing and realize some of the other implications of this find.
IF, (and it's a big if, I'll grant,) I'm right, you can think of this as geologists discovering a 9 billion year old rock in some place that isn't an obvious meteor impact site. Or carbon-dating a human-like skeleton and it turning out to be 35 million years old. Either it means your method of computing how old something is is WRONG, or how old you thought something (the human race, the earth, or the universe itself) is.
After all all big diamonds have curses on them!
It was one of a couple of TG-16 games they did on the Sega-CD. Funny thing was even though Lords of Thunder was basically the same game as the Duo-CD version the Sega-CD version of Dungeon Explorer was a totally new game.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Hmm... I don't know where I got the "trillions of years" to cool off number, but I can't find it now. I stand by my belief that the Big Bang folks are wrong, but it appears this isn't really evidence of that, I think maybe the figure was for cooling to near absolute zero, and 3000 Kelvins is a far fuckin' cry from 0. Umm... never mind, I guess. :-/
It's doubtful that the behavior of these elements under the perfect vaccuum prevailing on Earth's surface and in its mantle will carry over to their behavior at the surface of a collapsed star. Carbon atoms have a nominal radius of about 133 picometers. Under white dwarf conditions carbon atoms are compressed to more like 1pm, which is a good deal less than even the Bohr radius of the innermost 1S electrons.
Any regular lattice that forms under these conditions might happen to be tetragonal but I doubt it has anything to do with what we call diamond.
can I be first to call dibs.... :)
Nope. Units' names are lowercase, even if they were named after a person (and so their symbols are uppercase). It's Ãoe3000 kelvinà or 3000 K.
æseriously, Slashdot? Unicode is still a problem in 2014?
According to this blinking light, the tentacles are made of electro-matter, matter's bad-ass grandma. Nothing from our universe can penetrate it. Not diamondium, not diamondillium, not even your wife's pound cake, Hermes! [to Wernstrom] She's a terrible cook. Anyway, we're all dead.
Ahh, taking a big space truck with a bunch of strangers across a diamond planet called Midnight? What could possibly go wrong?
this should make any women happy.
i call dibs
happy trials
Thank you, King Friday !!!
And now for some more poetry from a television character...
Ibbity bibbity, sibbity sab.
Ibbity bibbity, canal boat.
Dictionary. Down the ferry.
Mary Mary, quite contrary.
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy lost his hair.
Scooba-doo and scooba-die,
That chicken`s not too young to fry.
Life is real, life is earnest.
If you`re cold, turn up the furnace.