"Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus..."
That's a remarkable statement. It's not a strange comment with recent news pointing out 5 planets discovered that all have surfaces of molten lava and one of them has the density of Styrofoam. The thing that makes this latest statement conceivable is that there is real science behind it. Real science meaning they conducted experiments in labs to see if their theories are correct.
"Eggert and his colleagues took a small, natural, clear diamond, about a tenth of a carat by weight and half a millimeter thick, and blasted it with lasers at ultrahigh pressures like those found on gas giants like Neptune and Uranus.
The scientists liquefied the diamond at pressures 40 million times greater than what a person feels when standing at sea level on Earth. From there they slowly reduced the temperature and pressure.
When the pressure dropped to about 11 million times the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth and the temperature dropped to about 50,000 degrees, solid chunks of diamond began to appear. The pressure kept dropping, but the temperature of the diamond remained the same, with more and more chunks of diamond forming.
Then the diamond did something unexpected. The chunks of diamond didn't sink. They floated. Microscopic diamond ice burgs floated in a tiny sea of liquid diamond. The diamond was behaving like water."
Since they could prove it in a lab I have more faith in their statements.
0 comments:
Post a Comment