http://space.newscientist.com/article/d … r-all.html
Article, with minor editing:
Article, with minor editing:
Uranus has no diamonds after all
20:57 12 July 2007
NewScientist.com news service
David Shiga
Hunting for diamonds on Uranus would be a lost cause, say the authors of a new study. Contrary to previous suggestions, this plannet does not have enough carbon to make diamonds, they say – but white dwarf stars do.
Some scientists have proposed that the high pressure inside Uranus could compress carbon into diamonds.
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.
Luca Ghiringhelli of the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands led a team that performed computer simulations of the pressure, temperature and carbon content inside Uranus.
They found that the rate of crystallisation of carbon into diamond was exceedingly slow because Uranus contains only 1 to 2% carbon.
"It's very unlikely that diamond would have formed in Uranus," study co-author Daan Frenkel of the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam told New Scientist. "As far as we can judge from these calculations, it's simply not possible."
