A layer of diamonds up to 18 kilometers (11 miles) thick could be tucked below the surface of Mercury.
A layer of diamonds up to 18 kilometers thick could be tucked below the surface of Mercury, researchers say.
"It's a huge press, which enables us to subject tiny samples at the same high pressure and high temperature that we would expect deep inside the mantle of Mercury, at the boundary between the mantle and the core," said Bernard Charlier, head of the department of geology at the University of Liège in Belgium and a coauthor of a study reporting the findings.
This mechanism, the researchers say, can not only give us more insight into the secrets hidden below Mercury's surface, but on planetary evolution and the internal structure of exoplanets with similar characteristics.Mercury is the second densest planet after Earth. A large metallic core takes up 85% of Mercury's radius, and it's also the least explored of the solar system's terrestrial planets.
When Lin, Charlier and their colleagues were preparing the experiment to mimic Mercury's interior shortly after the planet's formation, one crucial element was the knowledge that sulfur is also present on Mercury, as evidence fromhad shown. "We found out that the conditions are different from Earth because there is a lot of sulfur on Mercury, which decreased the melting point of our sample," Charlier said.
It's also impossible to tell how large the individual diamonds may be. "We have no clue about their size, but a diamond is made of carbon only, so they should be similar to what we know on Earth for their composition. They would look like pure diamonds," he said. The collaboration is named after an Italian scientist Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo, who invented the "gravity assist""BepiColombo can possibly identify and quantify the carbon on the surface, but also whether there is diamond on the surface or more graphite," Charlier said. "This was not possible with MESSENGER, and the measurements will also be more precise, giving us better estimates of the depth of the core-mantle boundary.
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