A Comic by Adam Robbins

Monday, January 25, 2010

Diamonds!

Worse News: It started as coal.  You might want to relax every now and then, buddy...

I think the title of the article below is interesting from a science journalism point of view. The direct accomplishment of the study was about the qualities of liquid diamond, a state that is very difficult to achieve. Because of this research, we now know that solid diamonds, like frozen water, are less dense than their liquid counterpart. And the conditions to achieve this are insane (Reminder: They melted a diamond with LASERS!), BUT similar conditions happen to exist on Uranus and Neptune. And based on other studies showing a fair amount of carbon on those planets, the hypothesis that they may have giant diamond oceans and diamond icebergs now has some more evidence supporting it.

Ah, Science!

Source:
Diamond Oceans Possible on Uranus, Neptune

About the Author

Providence, RI, United States
Adam is a recent graduate of Brown University, where he earned an Sc.B. in Biology.
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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. This means that you're free to copy and reuse any of my comics (non commercially) as long as you tell people where they're from. More specifically, you don't need my permission to post these pictures on your website (and hot-linking with the image URL is fine). Just be sure to include a link back to this page. Questions? Email me at AdamHRobbins at gmail dot com.

Also, to be fair, the wording of this was borrowed heavily from the CC License on Randall Munroe's Xkcd