NASA finds giant diamond planet 5 times bigger than Earth
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Scientists have found an an extraordinary celestial body, a planet consisting of a super-diamond with a mass akin to that of Jupiter, whirling around a pulsar located in the constellation Serpens, 4,000 light-years away from our planet.
The sensational planet, PSR J1719-1438b, is as big as 37,300 miles in diameter and five times greater than Earth while even larger compared to its star.
What’s most interesting is that this planet is thought to be the remains of a star whose outer layers were stripped off by the pulsar’s strong gravitational forces. The core, now a diamond planet, is mostly made up of carbon, and it has a density close to platinum. Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology says that this high density is a clear indicator of the origin of the planet.
The pulsar, PSR J1719-1438, is a millisecond pulsar. It rotates 10,000 times a minute and has 1.4 times the mass of our sun. Yet, its radius is only 12 miles.
The planet takes this pulsar only 2 hours and 10 minutes to orbit, at 370,000 miles. If it were any larger, the gravity of the pulsar would disintegrate it.
This amazing planet was discovered by a group of scientists from Australia, Germany, and the US. They used a 64-meter radio telescope in Parkes, Australia, and supercomputers to sift through an enormous 200,000 gigabytes of data. The fact that such planets are rare indicates that they are created under special conditions, making this find all the more surprising.
