Mercury is nobody's favorite planet. Our star's closest companion is a hateful little ball pocked with craters and patches of graphite, continually blasted by solar wind. But according to a recent study from a team of Chinese and Belgian scientists (via Space.com), there are diamonds under all that rough. A 10-mile-thick layer of diamond, to be specific.
Those patches of graphite I mentioned have led scientists to theorize that in Mercury's early history, it was host to an ocean of molten carbon that floated to its surface and cooled, leaving a carbon-rich mantle in its wake beneath the planet's crust. Using data from NASA'S MESSENGER spacecraft, the study calculates that a section of its mantle previously thought to be graphite may actually be a 10-mile-thick layer of diamond.
