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Takara Pink diamond, zoom photo:
A group photo of Takara pinks:
And here's a first cert!
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Sizes in this first set range from .31ct to .72ct. Most of these are already pairs and would be ideal for earrings or as side stones in three stone rings.
Color is almost entirely Fancy Intense pink, with just a few Fancy Intense Purplish pink. Clarity ranges from SI1 to as high as ... Internally Flawless.
Cut is mostly Excellent cut with some Very Good. For reference, we do not cut these to H&A in order to maximize the pink color.
We'll have studio photos and videos available late next week.
Pricing varies from $2000/ct to $3600/ct, so for example a .31ct would average $650sh. By way of contrast - mined pinks with this level of rich, sumptuous pink color can run over $200,000/ct.
Here's a .28ct Fancy Vivid Pink, SI2 mined - $57,730:
630304 loose diamonds, fancy color, pink, radiant cut, 0.28 carat si2 clarity
You can see more info at our new pink diamond page here:
Takara Pink Diamonds Lab Grown
and browse inventory tomorrow here:
Takara Lab Grown Diamond Inventory
We are now working on increasing sizes to have over 1ct+ size available as early as late November!
[Misc:[/b]
First ever observation of gold and platinum being made - from two neutron stars! Recently astronomers were able to witness, for the first time ever, the creation of gold in outer space! There had been theories as to how gold, platinum and the denser metals were created, but now it's been confirmed. The answer is via the collision of two neutron stars!
As a bit of humour, imagine that alchemists in the middle ages hoped to convert lead to gold. But the immense power needed to actually create gold or platinum is staggering. Consider that one teaspoon of a neutron stars matter weighs..10 Million tons! It's so dense the electrons and protons don't exist separately but are fused together into neutrons. When two of these collide, they smash together creating a variety of dense elements including lead, gold and platinum.
For reference, the observed collision created 200 Earths worth of gold! This is how the gold on your finger or the platinum in your jewelry came to be. After decades of theory, the mechanism behind it is now known and pretty wild to realize that the universe just became even richer in terms of gold and platinum and to know how the metals we work with and treasure came about.
"Spectroscopic observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the wake of the LIGO detection confirmed that heavy metals like platinum, lead and gold were created in the collision of the two neutron stars.
When stars smash into each other at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, the collision fuses atoms together and creates the elements that fill the bottom rows of the periodic table.
“These elements — platinum, gold, many other less valuable ones that are high up on the periodic table — they have more neutrons than protons in their nuclei,” Goodman said. “You can’t get to those nuclei in the same way that we understand elements up to iron being produced, by effectively adding one neutron at a time. The problem is that you have to add a lot of neutrons very quickly.” This rapid process is known to physicists as the r-process.
For a long time, scientists thought that r-process elements were created in supernovae, but the numbers didn’t add up, Goodman said. “But neutron stars are mostly neutrons, and if you smash two of them together, it’s reasonable to expect that some of the neutrons will splash out.”
"In fact, scientists estimate the recently discovered neutron star collision spewed out 200 times the mass of Earth — just in gold. But collectors, fear not: The metal is still precious, as is the event that made it. “In a galaxy like our own, these collisions maybe happen a dozen times, maybe a few dozen times per millions of years,” Kalogera says.
Likewise, take a hard look at any jewelry you’re wearing and consider that for a long time, we haven’t had a good explanation for where heavy metals like gold and platinum come from. According to Holz, the Big Bang explains the creation of some lighter elements like hydrogen and helium. “And then those elements form stars, and the stars burn and produce heavier elements, and that story works all the way to iron … but not past iron,” he says."
Here's a video from NASA showing (via animation) the basic process:
And article link:
Neutron star merger confirms decades of predictions by Princeton researchers
That's it for this month's blog update! With the holidays coming, we won't have one in December but will have the next on in January, and we can review the new bevy of fancy cuts available
For now have a great weekend and Happy Holidays - see you next year!
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