Space & Astronomy

Mercury may be home to a layer of diamond up to 10 miles thick

By T.K. Randall
July 27, 2024

Image: North Pole of Mercury
Credit: NASA / (PD) With temperatures ranging from an unimaginably freezing -173C during the night to a blisteringly hot 427C during the day across its equatorial regions, Mercury, which completes one orbit of the Sun every 87.97 days, is certainly not a place you would think to look for evidence of alien life.

Hidden beneath the planet's surface, however, may lie another kind of treasure.

In a recent study, scientists from China and Belgium who used NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft to investigate Mercury's interior determined that the planet might be home to a layer of solid diamond up to 10 miles thick.

There are two possible processes that could explain how such a feature might have formed."First is the crystallization of the magma ocean, but this process likely contributed to forming only a very thin diamond layer at the core/mantle interface," researcher Olivier Namur told Space.com.

"Secondly, and most importantly, the crystallization of the metal core of Mercury."

Of course, Mercury is not the only planet that might harbor large quantities of buried diamond - the Earth itself is thought to be home to over a quadrillion tons of it deep down beneath the surface.

Actually accessing these buried riches, however, remains - for the moment at least - impossible.

Source: Sky News

Tags: Mercury, Diamond