Submission + - 'Oceans of diamonds' on Uranus and Neptune (telegraph.co.uk) 3
Third Position writes: The Telegraph reports Oceans of liquid diamond topped with solid "icebergs" of the precious gems could be on Uranus and Neptune. The first ever detailed research into the melting point of diamond found it behaves like water during melting and freezing — with its solid form floating on the liquid.
A large diamond ocean on one or both of the planets could provide an explanation for an oddity they both share. The two giant gas planets, unlike Earth, do not have magnetic poles which match up with their geographical poles.
A large diamond ocean on one or both of the planets could provide an explanation for an oddity they both share. The two giant gas planets, unlike Earth, do not have magnetic poles which match up with their geographical poles.
Earth doesn't have magnetic polls that line up (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True, but the earth's poles have "mostly" lined up (one way or the other) with the geographical poles - or at least that's what I was taught in geology many years ago. There hasn't been anything more complex for long*.
See
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/reversals.html [bgs.ac.uk]
and the summary here
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n10/full/ngeo622.html [nature.com]
(search the title and authors of that for more links)
*a geologically long period of time that is.
No surprise (Score:2)
Well, since diamond is crystallographically identical to silicon, and silicon has that feature (the solid is less dense than the liquid), I'm not sure that this result is particularly surprising.