Space Wars Anyone???
10/2/99
The Reuters 'report' below failed to
mention what thediamond industry has
done countries like Congo and Angola.Uranus, Neptune May Be Diamond Mines - Report
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)
Uranus and Neptune may be giant diamond factories,
pressing out millions of the precious stones under the pressure
of billions of tons of hydrogen, researchers said Thursday.Experiments that aimed to re-create the heat and pressure on
the two planets produced tiny diamonds -- and what looked
a lot like oil, Robin Benedetti and colleagues at the University
of California at Berkeley reported in the journal Science.Benedetti and colleagues set up an experiment in which
they tried to simulate the enormous pressures and heat
that are believed to exist on Uranus and Neptune.Knowing there are large amounts of methane in their atmospheres,
Benedetti used special equipment to subject the methane to the
equivalent of the pressures on Uranus and Neptune --
100,000 to 500,000 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth.``I squeezed a little piece of methane between two diamonds,''
Benedetti, a graduate student studying planetary physics,
said in an interview.Then she added heat.
``I shone an infrared laser onto it and I found a significant
chemical reaction when it got hot...Some of the methane
decomposed completely to carbon in diamond form.''Methane is a molecule made up of four hydrogen atoms linked to a carbon atom.
Some of the hydrogen in the methane broke away from
the carbon, leaving the carbon to form pure diamonds.
The hydrogen and a few of the carbon atoms that were
left chained into hydrocarbons, Benedetti's team reported.She looked at the tiny diamonds in a microscope and also used
a technique known as X-ray crystallography to image them.Spectral images of the soup she made showed the
hydrocarbons were very similar to oil, she said, although she
stressed it was not exactly like the fuel oil pumped on Earth.What was more interesting to Benedetti than the creation
of two of the most precious minerals on Earth was the
ability to model in the laboratory what is happening
on a planet billions of miles (km) away.Once thought to be two big frozen, gassy blobs, Neptune
and Uranus have, in recent years, shown themselves to be
dynamic, interesting planets, both with rings like Saturn's.Astronomers have gleaned a lot of information from spectral
images taken with telescopes, and from images collected by
the Voyager 2 mission when the tiny spacecraft flew by the two planets.``If you picture it in your mind, there is a big atmosphere
of hydrogen and helium. Underneath that, there is a soup
of water, ammonia and methane under pressure from
the kilometers of hydrogen above,'' Benedetti said.The methane would be under so much pressure from the
weight of the hydrogen and helium above that it would be
solid, rather than in the gas form more common on Earth,
she added.``Either underneath or mixed in with the water and ammonia
and methane there are rocks and metals and stuff.''Benedetti said this was one of the first pictures anyone has
drawn of what is actually going on in the outer planets.``We used to just make these lists -- that inside these planets
there is hydrogen and helium and ammonia and methane and water,''
she said.
``Now we know a little bit of what they are doing.''