Scientists discover nearby ‘diamond planet’
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
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.
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.
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.
Earth has no shortage of water, either (if you include salt water). But in space, water is one of the most valuable things imaginable. It's rocket fuel, humans need to drink it, etc. Perhaps diamond would be similar.
OP says mining diamonds from outer space is nonsense, with good arguments, and you say ... what exactly? That space-mined diamonds are somehow more valuable than earth-produced ones?
I say, show respect for those with opinions. Maybe diamonds in space are 100% useless, I would be totally willing to accept that fact. I'm only upset at the rudeness and name calling.
> That space-mined diamonds are somehow more valuable than earth-produced ones?
If, in 20 years, we find a use for diamonds in space, then yes, they would be much more valuable than Earth ones since you don't have to transport them to space. Additionally, it seems quite likely to me that a strong compound like diamond would indeed have its use in space.
There is indeed some chance that mining diamonds from far-off planets would make economical sense. But there is some chance for almost anything happening. It's a trivial statement that doesn't add anything IMO.
Just because they're not on this planet...
or a small asteroid, which has a negligible gravity well.
Asteroid mining of other stuff is a separate issue.
Meaningful quantities of helium are not going to form outside the center of stars. But that doesn't mean the universe isn't littered with it due to star explosions and such. There's plenty of reason to think that diamond will exist in places that it didn't originally form.
As to helium, there is plenty of it on earth to do all sorts of useful things.
PS: Yea, that means diamonds are not forever.
(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")
Once there is a lot of it, the price drops. Anyone remember the Futurama episode where they go to the gold planet?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1982/02/have-you-e...
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.
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.
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.
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.
My understanding is that the assumption of diamond is made by making many measurements of the absorption spectra of the star to try and get an idea of what kind of matter is floating around it as dust and gas and from that trying to work out what the balance of chemistry in that system is likely to be.
You can also look at the star's spectra during a transit of the planet and use that to work out information about the atmosphere and surface.
At the end of the day, they do not know what is inside the planet, this is just their best guess based on what they can measure.
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...
(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.