SCIENTISTS have discovered a planet they believe is made of diamond. The international team, which includes Australian scientists, believes the "diamond planet" is the only remnant left from what was a huge star in our own Milky Way galaxy. The star, discovered in 2009, has become a pulsar - the dead remnant with about a diameter of 20km that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation. It was detected by researchers from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, led by Professor Matthew Bailes, using the Parkes radio telescope in central NSW. A month later, they noticed the pulses were consistently interrupted - a sign of something in orbit around the pulsar. That was later confirmed with other powerful telescopes in Britain and the United States.
The research has been published in the international journal, Science, and is only the third time one of the 1800-odd known pulsars have been found to harbour planets. What makes this planet so unusual is its size. At the most, it can only be 40 per cent the size of Jupiter. If it were any bigger, it would be orbiting inside the star's gravitational pull and would have been ripped apart long ago. Yet while the planet is small, its mass is slightly more than that of Jupiter. That kind of high density gave the team a clue to the planet's origin.
"The remnant is likely to be largely carbon and oxygen, because a star made of lighter elements like hydrogen and helium would be too big to fit the measured orbiting times," the CSIRO's Dr Michael Keith, a member of the research team, said. The team said it was certain the material is crystalline and that a large part of the star is similar to a diamond.
"The rarity of millisecond pulsars with planet-mass companions means that producing such exotic planets is the exception rather than the rule, and requires special circumstances," Dr Benjamin Stappers from the University of Manchester said.
More importantly - does it sparkle?
"It's highly speculative, but if you shine a light on it, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't sparkle like a diamond," Travis Metcalfe of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told New Scientist. The bad news for anyone who wants to get their hands on the newly-discovered mass of diamond is that it's 4000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Serpens.