Scientists discover nearby ‘diamond planet’

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137719-scientists-discover-nearby-diamond-planet

by mrsebastian • 14 years ago

36 45 14 years ago

awm• 14 years ago

The interesting thing about a 'diamond' planet is that it would be a waste of time. Diamond's value is superficial - it can't actually be used for anything (except cutting), so mining this planet would essentially cause diamonds to become worthless.

Whats more interesting is a planet made up of rare metals - that would still cause the prices to drop (this assumes the mining can easily generate lots of metal easily, transport costs aside), but can immediately be turned around into something useful.

taejo• 14 years ago

And the diamonds we do need for cutting can be synthesised on Earth pretty cheaply.

TNO• 14 years ago

It has uses beyond cutting: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/butler-diamonds.html>;

scarmig• 14 years ago

Rare earth metals are, despite the name, not actually all that rare. They're fairly abundant in the Earth's crust and mantle.

The reason they're more expensive than, say, iron, isn't that they're rare but they're rather difficult to purify from each other. They share the same outer shell electrons (s and d), and what separates them from each other is their f-shell electrons. Those, however, are buried inside the other shells. So their differences are largely driven by differences in atomic radius, differences which are small in chemical effect.

Which is all to say that the cost of producing them wouldn't change too much in that scneario, even if you had access to a trillion tons of ore for free.

dsr_• 14 years ago

It ends with a speculation that mining other planets doesn't sound so crazy any more.

Idiots. Diamond is not intrinsically valuable; carbon is not rare, and industrial diamond is fairly cheap. Humans (and in particular one cartel) set a high value on gemstone diamonds.

It's going to be cheaper to turn waste carbon into diamond here on Earth than it is to boost any sort of mining platform out to another planet or our own asteroid belt, and this will continue to be true for many many years.

cobrausn• 14 years ago

Until DeBeers makes sure that 'Certified Space Diamonds' are what you really want if you want to impress your significant other.

sbirchall• 14 years ago

Who's to say the value of Diamond has yet been truly appreciated? If I'm understanding things correctly this diamond would have formed under conditions we simply cannot recreate in a manufacturing process, given the magnitude of time and energy involved. It is not inconceivable that the properties of these carbon crystals could be VERY appealing. For an example I recall a statistic that claimed the entire _data throughput_ of the UK could be encoded on a crystal of carbon barely the size of a grain of sand. Space elevators and orbital rings spring to mind as well, and who's even saying that we want to get this stuff back to dirty old earth when we're jetting around the cosmos in our hyper diamond meta skeletons on stellar farm errands!?

Simucal• 14 years ago

The entire data throughput of the UK over what amount of time?

stephengillie4• 14 years ago

We have tons of carbon on earth. We inhale and exhale it all the time. It's one of the top 4 atoms in the universe, along with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.

Turning matter from diamond to carbon-fiber, or anything else, takes much energy. This is why diamond is so hard to cut - the carbon atoms have very strong magnetic bonds, and separating them takes a lot more force than separating iron atoms when cutting steel.

cryptoz5• 14 years ago

"Idiots"? Seriously?

The speculation is not merely about planets that are lightyears away. The speculation includes asteroids. The Google cofounders, and James Cameron, and others, are funding Planetary Resources, which will mine near Earth asteroids. They will be launching their first satellites in 2-3 years and plan on beginning mining operations in about 10 years.

I think you are being extremely shortsighted and rude to call people "idiots" when they speculate about mining the asteroids.

Edit: It saddens me that the top post in this thread contains such hate and name-calling towards someone with the imagination to think about the future. Come on, HN, you're supposed to be better than this.

Dove• 14 years ago

The criticism does not seem to be against asteroid mining in general, but against the idea that diamonds in space would make it more viable. Diamonds, especially for industrial use, are not something Earth has a shortage of.

Retric2• 14 years ago

Meaningful quantities of useful Diamonds are not going to form outside of significant gravity wells so 'asteroid' mining of diamonds is a waste of time. Diamonds are no where near rare enough to be worth transporting out of deep gravity wells and back to earth when they can be manufactured here cheaply carbon one of the most common elements.

Asteroid mining of other stuff is a separate issue.

seunghomattyang• 14 years ago

Related article on the topic of diamonds and cartel: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1982/02/have-you-e...

davorb• 14 years ago

The value of something is not determined by what it can be used for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

Of course it's not - but right now the value does not follow the real supply and demand curve, but is fixed by DeBeers, et al. We have lots and lots of diamonds, and if not for a clever decades long marketing campaign, they would be mostly worthless. Going to space to get more diamonds (which we don't need, because we already have too many of them) would be a colossal waste of resources.

stephengillie4• 14 years ago

Value isn't an intrinsic quality of anything. Humans value things, usually based on their relative utility.

(Likewise, quality isn't an intrinsic value of anything, either. Humans assign qualities to things. There is a buzzword called "quality" which means "homogenized reproducibility")

verelo• 14 years ago

Not to mention, diamond is only expensive because its rare and expensive to produce (and people tend to prefer to real thing...)

Once there is a lot of it, the price drops. Anyone remember the Futurama episode where they go to the gold planet?

zrail• 14 years ago

Diamond is only rare because DeBeers keeps it that way. Raw diamonds are actually fairly common as far as gemstones go.

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

It's neither rare, nor expensive to produce - and people tend to prefer real thing because DeBeers manufactured this trend through a decades-long marketing campaign. An article from 80's covers it quite well:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1982/02/have-you-e...

sageikosa2• 14 years ago

Given that the article did end with speculation that half a second of thought should've suppressed, "idiots" doesn't sound so extreme. It just sounds as speculative as the text it references.

hippich• 14 years ago

Something like this (except, not diamonds maybe, but some rare metal-rich planet) and girls/casino/blackjack will drive space exploration :)

ktizo2• 14 years ago

Girls could well drive space exploration, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Sperm is easy to store.

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

I think the true word that should be in quotes is 'nearby'.

mertd• 14 years ago

I like how "traveling to the planet and back will take you a lifetime, if you could travel as fast as light" translates to "nearby" when dealing with the scales of the universe.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

How can they possibly know what the planet is made of? Does anyone know?

btipling• 14 years ago

Via a Spectrometer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrometer

You can do it yourself. Do you know why the sky is blue? Because blue light waves are scattered by molecules in our atmosphere. The light emanating from distant stars also interact with the molecules in the star and nearby planets etc.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

I thought we couldn't see the light directly, only the wobble in the star?

Also wouldn't the light only show us what's on the surface? Or perhaps only the atmosphere? They seem to know there's diamond inside the planet.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

Presumably they inferred its mass from its orbital motion, and its size from how much light it blocks off as it crosses in front of its star. Density is smply mass divided by volume. Then they compare it to the density of known materials and find that only graphite and diamond are a good match.

uvdiv• 14 years ago

Here's the paper.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.2720.pdf

It's reasoned guess. They know three things about the planet: its mass, its size (radius/volume), and its orbital distance. They also know some of the chemistry of the star it orbits.

From the mass and radius, they inferred the density of the planet is a lower than other rock planets. They can explain low density in several ways. One is a thick layer of low-density supercritical water on the surface. Very large, extremely hot "oceans". An alternative is low-density graphite or diamond inside the mantle.

What they show is that a carbon interior is plausible given the data. They model several things. For one, the planet's formation from a primordial dust disk -- given the star's chemistry, which is unusually carbon-rich, and physical models of how elements separate out in accreting to planets. And they model the planet's current interior, based on known physics. They can't directly observe the planet chemistry; they can only model it.

Where are the measurements from?

The planet's radius/size was measured photometrically when it passed between us and its star (an occlusion, like an eclipse). They don't have the resolution to see the planet, but they can measure the reduction in the star's brightness when it occludes, and hence how big of a cross-section it has.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_extrasolar_planets#T...

The mass was discovered by measuring the gravitational effect on its star. It is a very tiny effect -- it's too small to see any difference in the star's position. But small changes in velocity shift the frequency of its emitted light, and that can be detected. This is a very small effect: the star's velocity variation due to this planet is just 6.3 meters/second, and it was measured with 0.2 meter/second precision! That's how they know the mass to within 5% accuracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_velocity_method

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.5709v1.pdf

The star's element composition is known by spectrometry -- measuring how much of an atom or ion is at its surface, by how much that atom absorbs light of a specific color.

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/spec_interp/sp...

sukuriant• 14 years ago

A planet made out of diamond and graphite. Why do I feel like this would be a terrible place to visit as a human, even with a breathing suit. If the crystal caves are any indication of what this planet would be like, it would be incredibly inhospitable --- though possibly quite pretty.

whyhellothere• 14 years ago

How does extremetech.com keep on getting to the front page of HN?

(this is an honest question, while I am trying to make a point, I would actually like to hear other peoples opinions)

Something always seems off about the quality of their articles compared to the other (above average) content that usually makes its way to the front page.

benologist• 14 years ago

Their parent company Ziff Davis has 5 or 6 different accounts they use to spam HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555756

russell• 14 years ago

9x10^28 carats. That's a pretty big ring.

Scientists discover nearby ‘diamond planet’

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