Diamond planet discovered

[mr friendly guy]

quick, don't tell the Ferengi

Scientists discover the diamond planet

* From: AAP
* August 26, 2011 9:22AM

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 thing left from what was a huge star in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The researchers, led by Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, first detected the unusual star - a pulsar - using the Parkes radio telescope in central NSW.

They later confirmed their discovery with other powerful telescopes in Britain and the United States.

The research has been published in the international journal, Science.

Pulsars are rotating stars with a diameter of about 20 kilometres which emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation.

The team noticed that the arrival times of pulses were systematically modulated.

They deduced that a small companion planet must be orbiting the pulsar and causing a detectable gravitational pull.

Further examination revealed that although the planet is small its mass is slightly more than that of Jupiter.

The high density of the planet gave the team a clue to its 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.

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.

First we had planet blacker than coal, now the diamond planet. What will we find next?

--Cleaned out the one-liners. Really, people. --Lagmonster

[madd0ct0r]

i don't see why it couldn't be a smaller lump of denser material - like lead for example.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

i don't see why it couldn't be a smaller lump of denser material - like lead for example.

The team said it was certain the material is crystalline

That would be one reason why. You don't exactly find crystalline lead very often. Anyway, lead's only roughly twice as dense as diamond, and you're unlikely to find such a large chunk of lead in one place, because elements heavier than iron aren't produced in the fusion of a star. The heavier elements require supernova nucleosynthesis to fuse, iirc, and thus they're much rarer and finding massive chunks of things like lead is a lot harder than finding a chunk of diamond, which is basically just carbon, an element that's very abundant indeed. There is roughly a million times more carbon in our entire solar system than there is lead, for example.

Besides, you really think they'd mistake a chunk of lead for diamond? Do you have any idea how many detectable differences there'd be between a planet made of lead and a planet made of diamond, even over a distance of 4000 light years? The two materials could hardly be more dissimilar. Diamond is shiny, transluscent, crystalline, and 10 on the mohs scale. Lead is darker, entirely opaque, and 1.5 on the mohs scale.

Sorry if this whole post comes off as me being a preachy asshole. Some of what I've said here may be only partially correct, or even entirely wrong. I'm no cosmologist, astronomer, or even a physicist. But to the best of my knowledge, there is no way they could mistake a lead planet for being a diamond one, and the likelyhood of ever finding a planet made largely of lead is vanishingly small.

[madd0ct0r]

I'd like to see them test the moh's scale value at 4000 light years away

I think you're working backwards.

My understanding of the article is they found the planet through the wobble it put in it's star.

that gives the orbital period, orbital ranges and mass.


now it's a tiny orbit, so small a gas giant couldn't actually do it - it needs to be a smaller planet of denser stuff.
like you said, carbon and oxygen are nromally the most popular elements lying around after a star goes phoomn.

given the amount of material, you can be certain of the pressure and possibly temperature at the centre of the planet and deduce that carbon would become crystalline under similar conditions.

The heavier elements need a supernova to be produced, but dosen't the planet orbit a neutron star? aren't those the remnants of a supernova?
(that's an honest question BTW)
I'm not suggesting a planet of solid lead, should have been clearer on that. but it could be a huge jumble of the different heavy elements produced - giving you a smaller and but denser planet that fits with the observations.

one good way to prove me wrong - neutron stars give out beams of radiation. Crystall lattices diffract beams of radiation in predictable ways - if the team has observed this, then proving a planet sized carbon lattice is feasible. But it ain't a giant glittery rock out there in space.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

Yeah, I came back and re-read the article later and felt a bit derp over some of the things I said after reading that they hadn't even directly observed the planet yet. And of course, I'm not saying a lead planet, or one made of some heavy element is impossible, just that it is substantially less likely than a diamond planet, particularly since the scientists did determine that the pulsar itself is largely similar to a diamond.

So yep, sorry for being a dumbas. And indeed, pulsars are formed in supernovae, but the heavier-than-iron elements formed in supernova nucleosynthesis tend to get sent scattering in all directions. Still, there's no reason why the small planet couldn't be made of denser elements, this is true. We'll have to wait and see, I suppose. My apologies on jumping to conclusions after improperly reading the article.

[starslayer]

The heavier elements need a supernova to be produced, but dosen't the planet orbit a neutron star? aren't those the remnants of a supernova?
(that's an honest question BTW)

Yes, neutron stars are (one class of) supernova remnants. However, the supernova itself blew the heavy elements out in the explosion, and as SilverWingedSeraph noted, elements heavier than iron require said supernova to form, plus they don't form in planet-mass quantities either, especially elements as heavy as lead. Therefore, it is a very safe bet that the planet is made of largely of stuff like carbon and oxygen and not of lead.

one good way to prove me wrong - neutron stars give out beams of radiation. Crystall lattices diffract beams of radiation in predictable ways - if the team has observed this, then proving a planet sized carbon lattice is feasible. But it ain't a giant glittery rock out there in space.

They only do so from their magnetic poles, which are never near their equators, where the planet would orbit. Bragg diffraction would be unobservable. Even if the body did pass through the beam, all the radiation would be absorbed (we are talking about something the size and thus thickness of a planet here), and even if some got through, the typical diffraction angle is a couple of degrees, IIRC. IOW, enough to miss us by several light years at least at its distance.

particularly since the scientists did determine that the pulsar itself is largely similar to a diamond.

They did not and couldn't possibly have; neutron stars are completely dissimilar to any normal crystalline or amorphous matter. To start with, they are composed almost entirely of neutrons, hence the name. Any protons would be confined to the crust, and the gravitational forces are so strong that a diamond-like crystal lattice would not survive.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

The team said it was certain the material is crystalline and that a large part of the star is similar to a diamond.

I was merely quoting the article. If it's wrong, well, blame them.

[madd0ct0r]

the article says the word star where they mean planet a few times.

[Lord Relvenous]

the article says the word star where they mean planet a few times.

They make the change when they describe what it really is. It's not a planet, it's the remains of a star.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

the article says the word star where they mean planet a few times.

They make the change when they describe what it really is. It's not a planet, it's the remains of a star.

Isn't that what all planets are? The remains of blown-up stars? This one just happened to form in a different fashion from other planets. Instead of having all the blown-up star bits scattered throughout a giant cloud of dust being collected into a planet-sized lump through gravity . . . this planet started out as a dead star and was cut down to a planet-sized lump by another star, which happened to blow up.

[Lord Baal]

Then indeed is a star, no matter how it came to it's actual state....

It would be a planet if is the result of the conglomeration of loose material. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Then indeed is a star, no matter how it came to it's actual state....

It would be a planet if is the result of the conglomeration of loose material. Correct me if I'm wrong.

How do stars form, again? Oh, that's right, by the conglomeration of loose material. The only difference is one of magnitude. A star collects enough material to initiate nuclear fusion in its core for some number of years. A planet does not. Fun fact: The composition of a Jupiter-sized gas giant is very close to the composition of the star it orbits.

[Brimstone]

So it is a white dwarf that has had much of its mass removed?

[Lord Baal]

Then indeed is a star, no matter how it came to it's actual state....

It would be a planet if is the result of the conglomeration of loose material. Correct me if I'm wrong.

How do stars form, again? Oh, that's right, by the conglomeration of loose material. The only difference is one of magnitude. A star collects enough material to initiate nuclear fusion in its core for some number of years. A planet does not. Fun fact: The composition of a Jupiter-sized gas giant is very close to the composition of the star it orbits.

Yeah.... that's why we don't call Jupiter a planet but a Star That Almost Was or STAW for short.... oh wait...

[starslayer]

No, Terwynn is correct. He said composition, not mass. Jupiter may be only 1/80th the mass necessary to initiate proton-proton fusion, but its atmosphere is about ~90% hydrogen and ~10% helium, compared to the solar composition of ~75% hydrogen and ~25% helium. Planets and stars do both form from conglomerations of loose material; for rocky planets, there is a large difference in the composition of that material, but not for the gas giants.

So it is a white dwarf that has had much of its mass removed?

Going by composition alone, that is one possibility, but I find it unlikely. More probable is that the planet formed out of the close debris left over from the supernova that created the pulsar.

[Lord Baal]

I knew it, but as Jupiter never became a star then is not one. As a star would not simply become a planet. I'm talking about the label of it, not the composition.

I now see why you didn't get what I was saying. Stars also are the result of the conglomeration of loose material. What I meant is that once enough of the required material are gathered to ignite the star, and the thing indeed ignite, from then on is a star, never again considered a planet, even if it reverts to the size of one by any kind of phenomena.