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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.
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.
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.
Isn't it supposed to just be "3000 Kelvin"?
Lemme call a buddy of mine to see what he can tell me about this.
How do you plan to handle delivery? An Earth sized chunk of carbon might require delicate handling as it is drop shipped on your home. BTW, a signature will be required.
If it's been gradually cooling for billions of years, I imagine that might create annealing-like conditions where the oxygen and carbon separate with the heavier solid oxygen at the core and a diamond lattice outside. So maybe it's diamond shell with a refreshing solid oxygen center?
This class of white dwarf stars are a mixture of primarily oxygen and carbon. Depending on the mass the amount of carbon and oxygen are roughly the same, but sometimes there is more oxygen. As the star cools it goes through a phase transition where the core becomes crystallized. This releases heat through two mechanisms: heat of crystallization and the release of gravothermal energy.
The inner crystallized section is enhanced in oxygen. The outer fluid mantel is enriched in carbon. Calling this a diamond is simply wrong. Perhaps at some point in the distant future one of these will cool and part of it will become a form of crystal carbon, but considering that the cooling time without mantle carbon crystallization is on the order of 10 Gigayears, it is not likely this has happened yet considering that the universe is around 13.6 gigayears old.
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/486/1/413/fulltext/34903.text.html
The Cooling of CO White Dwarfs: Influence of the Internal Chemical Distribution
Why is Snark Required?
Just imagine the shipping costs, seeing as the density of a white dwarf is 109 kg/m3, about 200,000 times that of the Earth!
Make sure you insure the package too.