Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs URANUS, NEPTUNE

[Ichingcarpenter]

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics.

The research, based on first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, found diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. The surprising revelation gives scientists a new understanding about diamonds and some of the most distant planets in our solar system.

"Diamond is a relatively common material on Earth, but its melting point has never been measured," said Eggert. "You can't just raise the temperature and have it melt, you have to also go to high pressures, which makes it very difficult to measure the temperature."


snip.............

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 floating in a tiny sea of liquid diamond. The diamond was behaving like water.


snip........

Up to 10 percent of Uranus and Neptune is estimated to be made from carbon. A huge ocean of liquid diamond in the right place could deflect or tilt the magnetic field out of alignment with the rotation of the planet.




http://news.discovery.com/space/diamond-oceans-jupiter-uranus.html

[Th1onein]

1. This is great!

Can you imagine a sea of diamonds?

[aquart]

2. Yes, but mine are cut and faceted.

[clear eye]

3. The overhead on importation'd kill ya. n/t

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

4. Watch out deBeers

Those vaults where you store more than 3/4 of all of the world's diamonds in order to keep prices high may not be worth so much.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. A Diamond 2500 miles across has been found.

Diamonds are relatively plentiful on Earth but DeBeer has a monopolistic control on the distribution and market....Nasty guys... Blood diamonds.



Astronomers Find a Huge Diamond in Space


When choosing a Valentine's Day gift for a wife or girlfriend, you can't go wrong with diamonds. If you really want to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond. But you'd better carry a deep wallet, because this 10 billion trillion trillion carat monster has a cost that's literally astronomical!

"You would need a jeweler's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond!" says astronomer Travis Metcalfe (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who leads a team of researchers that discovered the giant gem. "Bill Gates and Donald Trump together couldn't begin to afford it."
When asked to estimate the value of the cosmic jewel, Ronald Winston, CEO of Harry Winston Inc., indicated that such a large diamond probably would depress the value of the market, stating, "Who knows? It may be a self-deflating prophecy because there is so much of it." He added, "It is definitely too big to wear!"

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.
"It's the mother of all diamonds!" says Metcalfe. "Some people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.'

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.
For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.

"The hunt for the crystal core of this white dwarf has been like the search for the Lost Dutchman's Mine. It was thought to exist for decades, but only now has it been located," says co-author Michael Montgomery (University of Cambridge).



http://www.universetoday.com/2004/02/13/astronomers-find-a-huge-diamond-in-space/

[BadgerKid]

6. What am I missing?

According to the web, Neptune's atmosphere is cold (average 73 K) and nothing special as far as pressure (1-3 bars) goes. Since diamond requires high pressure (about 10000 bar), I am skeptical about diamond, much less floating diamond, having anything to do with Neptune.


www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/diamond/diamond.htm
www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/neptune/temperature-of-neptune/
www.solarviews.com/eng/neptune.htm
www.answerbag.com/q_view/516027

[Jim__]

7. According to the article cited in the OP:

Ultrahigh pressures, the kind of pressures found in huge gas giants like Neptune and Uranus are some of the places where ultrahigh temperatures and ultrahigh pressures exist. Eggert and his colleagues placed 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.

And, even according to one of the articles you cited:

If you could travel down into Neptune, temperatures would increase dramatically. Like all the planets, the temperature of Neptune's interior is much hotter than its outside. The temperature of the core of Neptune is 7000 degrees Celsius, which is comparable to the surface of the Sun.

The huge temperature differences between Neptune's center and its surface create huge wind storms. The winds on Neptune have been measured as high as 2,100 km/hour, which makes them the fastest in the Solar System.

It sounds like temperature and pressure vary dramatically on Neptune.

[gtar100]

10. Cold on the outside, 7000 degrees Celcius at the core. That can mean one thing:

That somewhere along the way there's a perfect 72 degrees Fahrenheit, perfect for an afternoon picnic. Love to find those sweet spots. Gotta get our travel speeds up to enjoy the view.

[On the Road]

8. I Believe They Are Suggesting

that pressures and temperatures near the core would be sufficient to melt diamonds.

The interior of the earth is very hot and filled with molten iron, but not reachable from the surface. Gas giants are a little different in that their solid core is much, much smaller, and much of the mass is composed of gases under pressure.

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Wha-What!

Maybe if we had known this a few years ago there wouldn't be any space gap.