By Emily Conover at ScienceNews   Image: MACIEJ TOPOROWICZ, NYC/GETTY IMAGES

Diamond stands up to a squeeze. Surprisingly, the material’s structure persists even when compressed to 2 trillion pascals, more than five times the pressure in Earth’s core, scientists report January 27 in Nature.

The study suggests that diamond is metastable at high pressures: It retains its structure despite the fact that other, more stable structures are expected to dominate under such conditions.

Studying diamond’s quirks at extreme pressures could help reveal the inner workings of carbon-rich exoplanets (SN: 7/16/14).

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By Charlie Wood for Quanta Magazine   Image: Phil Degginger / Science Source

What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable.

Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized sea — the multiverse.

Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each other in the hypothetical multiverse, physicists are studying digital and physical analogs of the process.

The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace the multiverse to explain why our bubble looks so special (only certain bubbles can host life), while others reject the theory for making no testable predictions (since it predicts all conceivable universes).

But some researchers expect that they just haven’t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.

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