by Kasey Cunningham

The Hope Diamond is famous for its 45.52 carat weight, its blue color and its mysterious curse. Now, scientists believe the world’s most famous diamond may hold the key to answering questions about Earth’s history from billions of years ago.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution report that the Hope Diamond contains a high amount of boron. In order to understand the composition of blue diamonds, they tested the amount of boron in the Hope diamond and an additional 77 blue diamonds. The “hope” was to see if there was a correlation between boron levels and the intensity of blue color that appears in a blue diamond.

The testing consisted of placing all 78 diamonds into an apparatus that fired gallium ions, peeling off atoms to sort by weight to reveal how many atoms were boron.

DTM’s former postdoctoral fellow Eloise Galliou (now a curator of the gem and mineral collection at the Natural Museum of History in Los Angeles, CA) led this research and concluded there was no correlation between the two.

“We tried to plot the intensity of the color versus the boron concentration. Basically, it gave no correlation between the two.”

The next step for scientists is to specify how many of each of the two types of boron are present in blue diamonds. The heavier type of boron can be found in rocks the ocean floor.

In fact, DTM staff scientist Steve Shirey believes that the boron came from an ocean plate that was pushed downward into the Earth to where diamonds form.

More research on the boron levels in the Hope Diamond will potentially lead to further explanations of the origin of the element, and ultimately give insight into the compositional history of Earth.

An international team of scientists led by DTM’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters and the current version of the manuscript can be found at http://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph

The team used public data from the European Southern Observatory and analyzed it with a novel data analysis method. They also incorporated new measurements from the Keck Observatory’s High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope.

Their planet-finding technique involved measuring the small wobbles in a star’s orbit in response to a planet’s gravity. Anglada-Escudé and his team focused on an M-class dwarf star called GJ 667C, which is 22 light years away. It is a member of a triple-star system. The other two stars (GJ 667AB) are a pair of orange K dwarfs, with a concentration of heavy elements only 25% that of our Sun’s. Such elements are the building blocks of terrestrial planets so it was thought to be unusual for metal-depleted star systems to have an abundance of low mass planets.