OT: diamonds are forever :)

[henk brouwer]

Originally posted by Arkcon:
I saw that story before, and what I don't get is how they know it's all diamond. I thought, thermodynamically, the most stable crystaline form of carbon was graphite. So what shape is this core in, a round sphere of bort, a mass of black graphite with diamond in it, or what?

The most stable form of carbon ON EARTH is graphite. The space diamont however is a collapsed star, it's mass is probably comparable to our sun, but it has collapsed to a size smaller then our moon. That means that the gravity and pressure at it's surface must be tremendous, and under such conditions diamont is a more stable form of carbon, (I think if you dumped graphite on the surface it would immediately be crushed into diamont by the intense gravity)

Hmm what about a new class of system objects in SEIV? space diamonts :-). probably not colonizable because of the intense gravity, but they would have a very high orbital mining output...

[ February 17, 2004, 09:48: Message edited by: henk brouwer ]