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.

Comments

he stopped caring by July 2nd, 2013

[raymorris]

He, like all presidential candidates, WAS profoundly egotistical and had a pathological need for approval, but that he seems to have given up on the approval part, going the way of "nobody understands but me". That sometimes happens when somebody becomes "the most powerful man in the world", of course.

His July, 2013 decision to start blatantly rewriting law, unilaterally, is ample evidence of that. Ev Almost everyone, the people who voted for him, congress members from his own party, his largest donors - all say what he's doing is unconstitutional and wrong, but he doesn't seem to care anymore.