ThinkingShift

This is very cool and for the amateur astronomers amongst us. You can participate in a new web-based galaxy classification system called Galaxy Zoo and help to classify one million galaxies. Involving the public will help speed up the classification process. I’ve already done my tutorial and passed the galaxy classification test, so am on my way to helping out.

The human brain being better at pattern recognition than a computer, the project will help to confirm whether all galaxies are rotating in agreement with each other (known as the Axis of Evil) or not. After a quick tutorial, you can start identifying the type of galaxy (spiral or elliptical); classify the direction of rotation for the spirals (clockwise or anti-clockwise); and check out whether galaxies are merging. Astronomers often get caught up in the detail, whereas the amateur might be quicker to spot a pattern or classify by gut instinct. Many of the digital images have never been seen before and were taken using the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico.

The Galaxy Zoo project is harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds : large groups of people collectively make smarter decisions than an elite few. Check out Galaxy Zoo and see if you would classify the galaxy image accompanying this post as spiral or elliptical (I pinched the photo from Galaxy Zoo).

Bummer….there are no diamonds to be found on the remote planets of Uranus or Neptune. Not that I’ve been there over the weekend to check - I have to rely on the expertise of the co-authors of a new study, Luca Ghiringhelli of the University of Amsterdam and Daan Frenkel of the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

After seeing Blood Diamond with Leo and his spiffy South African accent, I swore not to buy anymore diamonds (please don’t think I make a habit of doing that anyway) as they might be conflict diamonds. So I was hoping that when humans finally set foot on Mars (NASA is planning a sample-return trip to the Red Planet by 201 the words uttered would not be “This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” but more like “This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for womankind, cos there’s a whole lotta glittering diamonds in this red dust we’ve just stepped on”.

Alas, according to New Scientist, Ghiringhelli and Frenkel’s study shows that Neptune and Uranus simply don’t have enough carbon to make diamonds. Both planets only contain 1 to 2% carbon and, for diamonds to form, about 15% carbon is needed. Guess that means Mars too. A girl’s only hope apparently is white dwarf stars.

White dwarfs are burnt out suns and the dense core left behind after a sun has its melt down could contain as much as 50% carbon. If the white dwarf is young and hot, the carbon would exist in liquid form and is almost like a liquid diamond. As the dwarf cools down, the liquid starts to crystallise into a diamond. It’s possible that the white dwarf called BPM 37093 could have a moon sized crystal at is core. Now, this is encouraging: perhaps there are lots of white dwarfs out there with glittering diamond cores. I can just imagine this inspiring space-themed engagement rings - instead of the traditional diamond solitaire, perhaps a ring in the shape of a comet; or a large round diamond with gold wire encasing the diamond, like a dwarf core spitting dust and material as it dies.

But the diamond industry and bling buffs like me shouldn’t get too excited about all this - after all, setting up a diamond mine on a distant dwarf would be some feat and the dense gravity would probably crush you. Stating the obvious Frenkel says: “Don’t send a rocket out to these stars.. the diamond is too expensive to get, apart from the fact that it’s very hard to get something off a white dwarf.”