I am glad that you raised the point about the diamonds. Mining those things–now -that- would be a waste of money!

As for Jupiter’s impact scars, imagine that you have a puddle of clear water with a layer of sediment below. Now throw a rock into that puddle as fast as you can. This will disturb the sediment and muddy up the water, right? Now wait a while–what happens? The sediment re-settles and the water is once again clear.

The same idea, perturbing a stable equilibrium, applies to Jupiter. First note that although the planet is indeed a “gas giant,” it is truly not all that gaseous. Like Uranus and Neptune, as one descends through the Jovian atmosphere, the pressure and temperature rise dramatically and one would experience a gradual change from gas to liquid. However, unlike Uranus and Neptune, Jupiter is mostly hydrogen, and so beyond the gas-liquid layer, one would find a thick mantle of dense metallic hydrogen, as opposed to a layer of liquid diamond (carbon). Plunging a comet into this would upset the natural state and change the physical system. As a consequence, the perturbed region might not scatter and reflect the usual wavelengths of visible light that we see bouncing off of Jupiter’s cloud bands. Instead, the region, in this perturbed state, might absorb all visible wavelengths, and thus appear to be a black spot. Over time, given the ability of a fluid to flow, the natural equilibrium will reestablish itself, the normal scattering will resume, and the spot will disappear.

I hope that this answers your question!

First, the mean upper atmosphere temperatures of both planets are around 53-55 kelvins, which is nowhere near absolute zero (zero kelvins), and it only get hotter as you descend!

Second, these planets are nothing like Earth, which has a fairly well defined gaseous atmosphere terminating at a very well defined solid crust floating on top of a mushy, semi-molten mantle surrounding a liquid outer and solid inner metallic core. Instead, Uranus and Neptune are composed mostly of gases (as opposed to silicates, or rock, like Earth). As one descends through their gaseous atmospheres, one never lands on a solid surface! Instead, the pressure and temperature rise dramatically to orders of millions of atmospheres and thousands of kelvins–perfect conditions for creating oceans of diamond. In fact, in such conditions, the boundary between the liquid and gaseous states of matter vanishes, and we are left with what can only be described as a super-dense fluid (though it may still have solid chunks floating around in it). At their cores, the planets are dense masses of silicates, nickel, and iron–best described as if one were to put Earth into a pressure cooker.

I hope that this clears things up–if you have any more questions, Google them.

Mike,

You are striking a nerve, my friend. First, I am unaware of any space probe that has ever cost a trillion dollars (and if NASA had even a thousandth of that budget, it would be pretty amazing). Second, why must all scientific resources be devoted to “practical” endeavors? You would quickly find that by forcing us to fix your problems, fewer and fewer able minded people would go into science at all. Why? Because in many cases it is the discovery of new knowledge and the development of new understanding that excites our passions and draws us into the investigation of Nature to begin with! If someone told me that if I wanted to be a scientist, then I would only be allowed to clean up pollution, I would pursue my passions in art and music instead. In reality, I chose to study mathematics and physics—not to save the world, but to explore the Universe. Can you not appreciate learning how everything around you (and everything of which you are a part) works? We are, after all, as Carl Sagan most eloquently put it, “a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”

And if you truly believe that the solar system beyond Earth is “cold, radioactive and dead,” then you really ought to get out and see it, for you are terribly mistaken.

Ha ha – i cant wait to see if some schmuck points to this and says “see, global warming IS real”.

Aren’t the temperatures on Uranus and Neptune fairly close to absolute zero?

Am I missing something?

I’ll just mention that you bring up environmental issues – the greenhouse effect was better understood on Venus before it was applied to Earth (the modern version, anyway). There is a relationship and application of basic science to human needs.

The rest of the solar system, although mysterious and fascinating is cold, radioactive and dead. There are no beaches (well, maybe some liquid methane lapping at some shore somewhere), no forest, no coral reefs. Nowhere will we find more exotic life and wonders than right here. Even if there are some bacteria-like organisms living in areas under the ice on Europa or Enceladus, I doubt they will surpass in crazyness and wonder anything existing here.

So many social problems plague the Earth and as man and his religions struggle for power and resources and strip the planet down and dirty it’s skies so we can fill malls with stuff, we seem to be looking away from the issues here and dreaming of something else to focus on out there. I really see the human race heading in the direction of Disney’s Wall-E. We are spending billions of dollars on this stuff and great scientific minds are spending their careers studying how fast the wind is on Neptune, or the molecular make-up of pink ice on Pluto. I will just have faith that learning about these things will have some positive application or use here on Earth (besides mining for diamonds to sell to the rich)….and I do and will enjoy the info…I would just love to see more scientist get together and figure out how to clean up the Pacific plastic patch…find ways to decrease soots and particulate pollution…

The theory of the Treatise proposes such ferromagnetically ordered environments of the liquid diamond, higher density fermionic sp3 carbon (diamond) liquid, and lower density bosonic solid diamond just as observed experimentally by Eggert and others via their electromagnetic (laser) pressurizing and melting diamond and just as these liquid diamond and solid diamond states possibly exist on Uranus and Neptune for explaining the unusual shifts in the magnetic poles of these planets relative to their geographic poles. This is a great example of a very beautiful consistency of a prior theory to recent experimental data with applications to Uranus and Neptune.

Reginald B. Little