Diamonds on Mercury | COSMOS in a minute #47

The surface of Mercury may be covered with 16 quadrillion tonnes of diamond. That’s 16, followed by 15 zeroes. Mercury's surface is mostly made of graphite, a form of carbon. When graphite is subjected to high pressure and heat, it can turn into a diamond. The pressure and heat needed to turn graphite into diamond is created by the impacts of asteroids and comets. Mercury is constantly bombarded by these objects. To estimate the amount of diamond dust on the surface of Mercury, researchers ran a simulation. If Mercury were coated in graphite 300 meters or 984 feet thick, modeling 4.5 billion years of impacts on a graphite crust shows that there could be 16 quadrillion tonnes of diamond on its surface. That’s 16 times the stockpile of our planet. If confirmed, this would make Mercury the most diamond-rich planet in the solar system.

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