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NIF Compresses Diamonds With 50 Million Atmospheres of Pressure
sciencehabit (1205606) writes The world's largest laser [the National Ignition Facility], a machine that appeared as the warp core in 'Star Trek into Darkness', has attained a powerful result: It's squeezed diamond, the least compressible substance known, 50 million times harder than Earth's atmosphere presses down on us. ... As the researchers report online today in Nature, the x-ray assault nearly quadrupled the diamond's density. "That's a record," Smith [one of the researchers] says. "No one's compressed diamond to that extent before." The blast pulverized the diamond into dust, but before the mineral's destruction the scientists successfully measured its density ... For a billionth of a second, the diamond, which is normally 3.25 times denser than water, became ... 12.03 times denser than water. ... Scientists have speculated that diamond worlds may exist elsewhere. If a solar system arises with more carbon than oxygen, then carbon should soak up the oxygen by forming carbon monoxide, leaving excess carbon to create carbon planets—which, under pressure, become diamond worlds. Thus, Smith says, the new experiment will probe the nature of such planets.
They are performing similar experiments with iron in an attempt to understand the properties of super-Earth cores.
Can someone explain this with a car analogy?
I see that mistake so often. It should be "star system" because only our star system is called "Solar system" because our star is called Sol.
So, if we can mount a NIF-like laser onto a shark, we can use it to transform diamonds into dust?
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
If you want to get technical, you compress excrements into turds.
How close did this come to creating a black hole?
Still quite short of actual fusion though... What I always wonder when I look at places like grand canyon (you see a mile of rock pushing down on other rock...) is just how much pressure is out there in everyday life happily existing all around us... and yet even the immense pressure of Jupiter's core is not enough to start fusion...
And here we are attempting to generate *more* pressure than the core of Jupiter in a device at NIF... enough to rival the pressure at the center of the SUN... If we succeed in generating and controlling that plasma, that will be one amazing trick we play on nature.
Also.... Jupiter... there be diamonds in there... Arthur C. Clark said so!
So that's how De Beers keeps their monopoly, they dispose of extra diamonds... by crushing them with a really expensive laser...
What are you babbling about? Are you so deranged by wingnut media that you're posting wingnut comments in random threads?
Disappointing that the Star Trek tie-in was mentioned but the link was omitted...
National Ignition Facility provides backdrop for "Star Trek: Into Darkness"
Can't sustain fusion, so let's use the nice shiny laser to zap things and pretend its science :-)
It presses us from all sides with the same force (except for a minuscule difference due to different height of things). This is a real stupid beginner's mistake.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
not allow them to sell these diamonds? They could fund their own research if the Republicans didn't suck the DeBeer's dicks so hard. That is the way of their kind. Instead of giving us diamonds that have so many industrial uses, the Republicans require them to be destroyed. They hate us and want us to waste money on rings and on drill bits and saw blades that dull in a matter of minutes. They are so hateful.
Oh man, we would be so rich ....
While Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, and the longest serving Democrat in any national office, he wrote scathing commentary about Obama ignoring the Constitution and legislating from the oval office. Nobody is more democrat than Byrd. More recently, the distinguished Senator from Ohio wrote that Obama's handling of Obamacare is clearly unconstitutional.
I understand you're probably infatuated with the guy, but peek around the blinders once in a while.
Apparently, they're doing experiments like this at the LHC too: http://www.theonion.com/video/...
The budget of the NIF is slated to be zeroed-out, i.e. killed, in the current U.S. Congressional Budget Negotiations.
Unless "God" Intervenes, you are allowed to choose your "God", NIF is dead.
All I get out of this is that greedy guts are looking to mine other planets for diamonds.
I welcome our new overlords.
The taxpayers bought a bunch of scientists some incredible equipment to help them develop the most amazing car ever. The new car the scientists promised would be faster than any rocketcar to cross the salt flats, more rugged than an MRAP, have more luxury than a Maybach, and be nearly free to operate because it would run on sea water.
As the decades slipped by and people asked these scientists "where's our shiny new ultimate car?" the scientists always gave the same answer: "We just got the first cough of ignition from the new motor and tha dashboard lit up, but we need a few more years (and more money) to complete it"
Now we got a press release that they have been using the super-car building machine to destroy diamonds, which they apparently found to be more interesting than making the super car they kept promising.
For "super car" substitute "fusion reactor", then get angry and demand that all involved be fired immediately for spending ANY time and ANY money at the National Ignition Facility doing ANYTHING not DIRECTLY involved in creating a working nuclear fusion reactor which is the whole reason their paychecks and that damned facility exist in the first place.
How long until Beyoncé is spotted wearing an ultra-dense diamond at <insert music/film award night of your choice> ?
That's something between you, your uncle and the horse
A standard atmosphere (atm) is an obsolete non-SI international unit of pressure defined as 101.325 kPa. For practical purposes it has been replaced by the bar, which is 100 kPa.