

Astronomers discover planet made of diamond - rblion
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-planet-diamond-idUSTRE77O69A20110825

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kevindication
Amazingly timely given that I'm about half way through A Deepness in the Sky.

(A diamond asteroid figures into the plot.)

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masterzora
Not _that_ amazing. Considering that Vinge is of high interest to a number of
HN readers, that there are a fair number of HN users, and that Deepness in the
Sky is of sufficient length and density that a readthrough (especially a
first) can take a pretty decent length of time, I wouldn't find it at all
surprising is there was always at least one HN commenter who either was
currently in middle of or had just finished Deepness in the Sky.

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prawn
Am I the only one imagining the Dwight Schrute meme while reading this?
<http://memegenerator.net/Dwight-Schrute>

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SoftwareMaven
If we could make a few discoveries like that a little closer and in slightly
more hospitable environments, maybe we could get some enterprising capitalists
to try to cash in, and thereby make our way through and beyond the solar
system.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

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Natsu
Diamonds are just a special form of carbon which is, itself, not very rare.
Granted, it's fairly hard to coax carbon into that form, at least if you want
something that looks like a gem, but we already have CVD processes which can
make diamond.

The main reason they're valuable is due to marketing.

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burke
Yup. Producing several megatons of diamond in labs would be many orders of
magnitude easier than harvesting it from another planet.

Even if it were the moon that were made of diamond, I strongly suspect that
the energy requirements to harvest it would _still_ exceed the normally-
extreme energy requirements of growing it in a lab.

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typicalrunt
_harvesting it from another planet_

You raise an interesting idea here. I wonder how difficult it would be to
harvest diamond from a diamond planet. Diamond can be cleaved if you hit it at
the correct angle [1] but if the entire planet is made of diamond then what
would happen? Would a wrong cleave or heavy force shatter the planet into
nothingness?

Rather, I think the planet is made of many small (relative to an entire
planet) sized diamonds embedded in dirt.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cutting#Cleaving_or_saw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cutting#Cleaving_or_sawing)

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jarin
You can cut diamond with diamond saws or lasers, if you wanted to pull out
diamond bricks from a big mass or whatever.

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rblion
Curiouser and curiouser...

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can
imagine." \- Sir Arthur Eddington

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bond
I can imagine a colony being set there by the year 4000 run by the
"Company"...

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glimcat
The sky is made of diamonds.

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stan_rogers
Not all of it -- this is obviously a custom job from Magrathea.

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glimcat
That, or the Spiders. But I didn't see an erupting binary with a disturbingly
regular 250-year period.

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shasta
Twinkle twinkle little star ... Like a diamond in the sky

