If you don’t know a good store for diamonds, maybe you should consider searching for such minerals on Mercury. But keep in mind that you’ll need some strong protective astronaut suits. That’s because you know: let’s just say that the weather is pretty bad there.
Now seriously, considering that Mercury is the first planet from the Sun, you can easily conclude for yourself that there are scorching temperatures there. But that doesn’t mean that only bad things happen on Mercury. According to planetary scientist Kevin Cannon, the planet could be teeming with diamonds due to many years of collisions with meteorites, as ScienceNews.org reveals.
One-third of Mercury’s crust might be made of diamonds
Cannon ran some computer simulations of 4.5 billion years of meteorite impacts that support his wild scenario. If it’s true, it means that a third of the crust of the small planet is loaded with shiny gemstones.
Perhaps we all know that diamonds are created under huge pressures and temperatures, which is why we can find them near volcanic sites on Earth. There’s no wonder why someone would bet on meteorite impacts as leading to the creation of the beautiful gemstones as well.
Simone Marchi, who’s a planetary scientist who wasn’t involved in the new research, is also very optimistic about the possibility. He said as ScienceNews.org quotes:
There’s no reason to doubt that diamonds could be produced in this way.
Mercury is also known for having the most craters in the entire Solar System. Despite its small size, being smaller even than some of the Solar System’s moons, Mercury’s biggest crater is bigger than Western Europe. It’s obvious that nature hasn’t been too forgiving with Mercury, but perhaps that’s the way that it had to happen. Perhaps in the far future humanity will have the right technology to travel to Mercury and to collect diamonds from it.
