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Diamond Update
New Scientist has a much better description of that monster "diamond" we covered last weekend:
[T]he crystal, which has been likened to a diamond, is in fact unlike any known on Earth. The pressure inside the white dwarf is a million million times the pressure that produces diamonds. This pressure strips electrons from the atoms, leaving the nuclei to form a crystal lattice surrounded by a sea of electrons.
This stuff is so exotic because it is so dense. I wonder if you were to somehow scoop or break a chunk off and carry it away, would stay this super weird kind of matter or "devolve" into something more common? Would it spring back to a much greater volume like a balled up piece of paper, or would it stay collapsed like a crushed can?
It's not really the gravity that holds this stuff together, but the pressure from the many thousands of miles of gases above it. At the center, gravity itself would actually cease to be much of a factor, as the mass of the star generates nearly even gravitational pulls in all directions.
What would happen if we pulled this stuff out of the core? Almost certainly it would decompress most spectacularly. The end result is much more likely to resemble a rapidly expanding cloud of carbon atoms (along with the atoms of anything else in the vicinity) than any diamond.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on February 18, 2004 09:57 AM