A planet made entirely of diamond, prosaically known as PSR J1719-1438, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers led by Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and including researchers from Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA. The discovery was initially made using the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia; a radio telescope which will be well known to those who’ve seen the movie The Dish as a vital part of the network that received signals from the Apollo 11 mission, covering most of the moonwalk. The discovery was subsequently confirmed using telescopes in Hawaii and the UK.
Professor Bailes’ team made the discovery while studying pulsars, a type of extremely dense star caused by the collapse of giant stars under the force of gravity generated by all that mass(stars get heavier as they burn, as hydrogen is converted to helium by nuclear fusion and then to ever-heavier elements). Pulsars come from giant stars which do not quite reach the mass necessary to collapse all the way down into a single point (a black hole, or singularity) but which come close. To get an idea of how dense a pulsar is, pulsars are around 20km in diameter, while containing the leftover mass of a star many many times the size of our sun (in the case of the pulsar which led to this discovery, it contains 1.4 times the mass of our sun within that 20km diameter, and this is less than 1% of the mass the star would have had before it collapsed). Pulsars spin and give off radio waves, and shifts in those radio waves provide a lot of information about a pulsar’s movements that we can’t easily get from other distant stars.
While studying a pulsar 4000 light years away in the Serpens constellation, Professor Bailes’ group determined that the pulsar had a companion planet in orbit around it, then that the planet went around the pulsar every 2 hours and 10 minutes at a distance of 600,000km, that the planet must be under 60,000km in diameter and yet be heavier than Jupiter. They were eventually able to determine that the planet was mostly crystalline carbon. The theory is that a chunk of the star that became the pulsar broke off as it collapsed into denser and denser states, with enough mass and energy to avoid being pulled right back into the pulsar but not with enough to hurtle off into the depths of space.
The astronomers theorize that the diamond planet will be glowing white hot, which could potentially allow for it to be spotted on visual telescopes like the Hubble.
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The image below represents the diamond planet orbiting the pulsar. The dashed line represents the orbit of the planet, while the wavy line represents the radio wave given off by the pulsar.
(Images: Ashley R. Good, Swinburne Astronomy Productions )
