Discovery

NewScientist America reported, a new study found that Uranus or Neptune do not have enough carbon to make diamonds, they say – but white dwarf stars do.

The high pressure inside Uranus and Neptune could compress carbon into diamond, some scientists have proposed before. But a new study says that even if diamonds could form in them in principle, the process would take longer than the age of the universe, so we should not expect any to be present yet.

It has found that the rate of crystallization of carbon into diamond was exceedingly slow because Uranus and Neptune contain only 1 to 2% carbon.On the other hand, planets would need to contain more than about 15% carbon for diamonds to form. But the authors say diamonds should be present inside white dwarf stars, which are the dense cores left behind when stars like the Sun use up all of their nuclear fuel and throw off their outer layers. Some of these white dwarfs are expected to contain about 50% carbon, which would be more than enough to produce diamonds. When the white dwarf is young and hot, the carbon would exist in the form of a liquid, just like a liquid diamond. They guess that this liquid has a big chance to create a massive scale& quickly diamond if the dwarf cooled and crystallizing into diamond.

Of course, even if there are white dwarfs with diamond cores out there, the vast distance between Earth and other star systems puts them out of reach for diamond mining. Extracting the diamonds would also be difficult because the pull of gravity is extreme on the surfaces of the dense stellar corpses. This is not a choice, because the “diamond” is too expensive to get, apart from the fact that it’s very hard to get something off a white dwarf.

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