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Diamond world

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Fri, 2011-08-26 05:54

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Diamond world

Here is a real world exoplanet that would make a great and terrible setting for gatecrashing: http://io9.com/5834103/a-destroyed-star-becomes-a-planet-made-of-diamonds https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PSR_J1719-1438 https://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/08/19/science.1208890.abst... http://www.swinburne.edu.au/chancellery/mediacentre/resources/Diamond-pl... It is a former stellar core orbiting the pulsar PSR J1719-1438 (period two hours and ten minutes, about 700,000 km away). And mostly made of diamondoid. With a diameter of just below five earths (55,000 km) and a mass of Jupiter, the surface gravity is 12.72 G. If you are 1.8 meters tall it takes less than 0.17 seconds to trip over - and then you make a 13 times heavier impact than on Earth. Ouch. This is a place where a 1 meter fall is equivalent to falling 13 meters in 1 G. The pulsar has a temperature of about 4500K, making it a flickering orange pinprick in the sky. It is sure to bathe the world in nice radiation and oscillating electromagnetic fields (it has a spin-down luminosity of 0.4 solar luminosities - it is shining very bright in radio at this close distance!). It is a millisecond pulsar with a period of 5.7 milliseconds - I wonder whether that might be in the range that induces neural activity in biomorphs or does weird entrainment of gamma waves? If so, it might have odd psychological effects too. Not sure if it would be tidally locked; I doubt it. Definitely no moons (since the original star was stripped away, the moons/planets would have followed). The surface environment likely includes an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide over a very flat landscape. A big question is how old the place is, since it determines the temperature. It could be fresh and glowing, or cooled down to a frosty state. Diamond is an excellent thermal conductor, so it would likely cool off relatively quickly. It is also an electrical insulator, so I don't think the pulsar will induce heating with its fields. However, deposits of more conductive compounds might cause local heating. Anyone up for diamondoid based high gravity lifeforms, with lichen-like plants feeding on the EM fields using antennas?

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Fri, 2011-08-26 10:03

Covariant

Re: Diamond world

It's diamond memory storage recording the entirety of some dead post-Singularity civilization's knowledge. Unfortunately, the civilization was so advanced that they used infectious memes as language tokens, so attempts to read the stored data tend to destroy the curious civilizations.

Fri, 2011-08-26 10:39

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Diamond world

Covariant wrote:
It's diamond memory storage recording the entirety of some dead post-Singularity civilization's knowledge. Unfortunately, the civilization was so advanced that they used infectious memes as language tokens, so attempts to read the stored data tend to destroy the curious civilizations.

Destroy? Nah, they just melt down into infectious memes too. A book that turns the reader into a book. Incidentally, those diamondoid lifeforms I suggested might have an interesting tendency to seek out valuable trace materials, especially metals. On a white dwarf core there might be a shortage of heavier elements (they have sunk deeper), but they need them for their antennas. So the lichen-like plants start to flourish everywhere in human equipment, slowly digesting it into antennas. Meanwhile there are creatures like leaf cutter ants that collect metals for their "antenna gardens", further sabotaging equipment.

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Thu, 2011-09-01 14:33

Saerain

Re: Diamond world

Kuchner proposed carbide planets some time ago, but I'd assumed that if they did form, they'd be Earth-sized or smaller and of similar mass. The notion of one this massive and dense pretty much blows my mind.

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