looking for a new diamond? turn right at the second star and continue on for about four thousand light years. keep your eyes open for psr j1719-1438 in the constellation serpes. psr j1719-1438 is a millisecond pulsar star about the size of a small city. being a pulsar, it emits a highly focused beam of radio waves that are sent out across the depths of space like a lighthouse. in orbit around this star is planet psr j1719-1438 b, which should really be renamed Lucy. this planet is unique in that it is a diamond 60,000 kilometers (37,300 miles) across (half the size of Jupiter). scientists believe it to be a mere 600,000 kilometers from its sun, the pulsar, and completing a full rotation in approximately two hours and twenty minutes.
this particular pulsar spins at about 10,000 rotations a minute though it is only, approximately, twelve miles in diameter. the suspicion is that this star went from average to pulsar after a supernova in it’s binary system. scientist also expect that the sister star which exploded is still present in the system, though it look much different than it used to. the theory is that once the star went nova it donated much of its mass to its sister star, now pulsar. this increase in matter and energy sped up the rotation of the pulsar moving it from average pulsar to millisecond pulsar as defined by it’s rapid rotation. science believes that what normally happens in these instances is the supernova becomes a white dwarf star and the two continue to tango or is completely absorbed and is never seen again, but what appears to have happened here is the pulsar consumed the vast majority of it’s sibling but left the core alone which somehow managed to move back to a safer orbit. now at 600,000 kilometers (372 822.715 miles) the star’s core cooled down to a mass of carbon roughly five times the size of earth. to give you an idea of the how close the mass still is to it’s sun, our sun has a radius of 695,500 kilometers, thus its orbit would fit inside our sun, that is how close these two celestial bodies are dancing. this close orbit puts a lot of gravitational pull on the former star which would cause it’s gooey carbon center to harden and crystallize into a giant diamond.
how do we know all this stuff? good question. the system was first observed in 2009 by an international team of fancy radio telescopes in australia, italy, great britain, the usa and germany, with the discovery publicly released in an article in the science journal of August 25, 2011. it was discovered as part of a project to systematically search for pulsars in an ongoing attempt to map the heavens. 200,000 gigabytes of data collected from fancy radio telescopes are sent to specialized supercomputers with fancy analytical programs designed specifically to look for the fluctuations pulsars are named for. with the discovery of this particular pulsar, astronomers noticed a “regular modulation in the arrival times of the signals,” which essentially means that something moves in front of the star at regular intervals, ie, a planet. once we take what data we have on the pulsar and compare it to the data that is missing during the modulations we can apply some fancy math to learn several things about the planet disrupting the signal of the pulsar. the frequency of the modulation tells us the speed and distance of the orbit. to survive at so close and fast an orbit tells us that it has to at least be as strong and dense as platinum, which means it was once a massive star. the remnant of the star most be predominantly carbon and oxygen, based on the data observed and due to what we suspect about the gravitational forces that close to a pulsar the carbon is most certainly in a crystalline state and therefore must be a diamond in the sky.
meet psr j1719-1438 b — the diamond planet – jonthanturley.org
surprise! alien planet made of diamond discovered – space.com
cosmic bling: astronomers find planet made of diamond – wired.com
the diamond planet – spacedaily.com
