Alex McColgan
speaker
29,581 appearances
105 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard yesterday
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 69 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
A planet only generates a magnetic field if it has a partially molten, electrically conducting core that's actively churning, which Mercury does.
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In fact, in 2024, a team of researchers led by Yongxian Tzu found that Mercury might have a layer of diamonds between its core and its mantle.
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They recreated the crushing pressures and temperatures of Mercury's deep mantle in the lab, and found that conditions at the boundary with Mercury's core are just right for carbon to crystallize into a solid layer of diamond.
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anywhere from a few hundred meters to fifteen kilometers thick.
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That's right, diamonds.
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It might sound outlandish, but the model fits the data.
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Mercury's surface is unusually rich in carbon, mostly as graphite, and we think much more is locked away inside.
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Under the right mix of pressure, temperature, and Mercury's unusually high sulfur content,
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that carbon could take the form of diamond rather than graphite.
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Remember, Mercury's magnetic field is generated by the churning of its molten core, the convection current driven by hot liquid rising, cooling at the top and falling back down again.
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Diamond happens to conduct heat better than almost any other material we know of, so a diamond shell wrapped around the core could influence how the planet cools and ultimately the magnetic field itself.
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While we can't slice the planet open to reveal the diamonds inside.
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We can do the next best thing.
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Send Beppy Colombo to sweep the magnetosphere for clues.
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During its flybys, it activated its Mercury Plasma Particle Experiment, an instrument designed to examine the particles moving through Mercury's magnetosphere.
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We samble the type of particles, how hot they are and how they move, enabling us to clearly plot the magnetic landscape during this brief period.
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said Lena Hadid, formerly of Issa and now at the Labortoir de Physique des Plasmas at Paris University.
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The Mercury plasma particle experiment confirmed some expected magnetosphere structures, like the bow shock, where the solar wind slams into the planet's magnetic bubble.
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And the plasma sheet, that hot ribbon of charged gas streaming out behind Mercury like a tail.
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But it also found something unexpected.
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Showing 2741–2760 of 29,581 · page 138 of 1480
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