26 August 2011

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Diamond Planet found orbiting a Pulsar by team of scientist

Diamond Planet found orbiting a Pulsar by team of scientist

An international team of scientists reported in Journal Science that they have found a planet entirely made of diamonds. Scientist reported that they have unearthed a once-massive star in the Milky Way that has been transformed into a small planet made of the precious rock.


An international team of scientists from Australia, Italy, Germany, Britain and the US -- first found an unusual star, called a pulsar, and followed up their discovery using a telescope based in an observatory in Cheshire.

It led the scientists to discover the gravitational pull of a small companion planet orbiting the pulsar.

Pulsars are small spinning stars more than ten miles in diameter the size of a small city that emit a beam of radio waves.

The companion planet is small; at less than 40,000 miles wide about five times the diameter of Earth.

The researchers think that the “diamond planet" is all that remains of the original star, most of whose matter was siphoned off towards the pulsar.

research team member Dr Michael Keith of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia said that This 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,"

This dead remnant of a star glows red like a hot ember, and is spinning 173 times per second, emitting powerful radio beams that sweep across the sky as it rotates.

A closer look reveals it to be an orb with the mass of Jupiter and about half as wide. Sensors indicate it's made of – wait, this can't be right – diamond! Your instruments don't lie. You've just stumbled upon a 1031-carat diamond.

Watch the video – Diamond Planet found orbiting a Pulsar



The team also calculated that the distance between the pulsar and its planetary companion is approximately 600,000 kilometres, 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Both are located 4000 light years away in the constellation of Sepens (the snake), one eighth of the distance to the centre of our galaxy.

According to van Straten, the Parkes telescope was used for the survey because it can scan the sky 13 times faster than "your average telescope".


This is only the second time a planetary mass has been found orbiting a pulsar. The first planetary system outside of our solar system was discovered around a pulsar in 1992.

The international research team led by Matthew Bailes of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne published its findings in the journal Science.

Co-investigator Willem van Straten, also at Swinburne, said that this millisecond pulsar (MSP), so named because it rotates thousands of times per second, was detected in the Milky Way galaxy by the Parkes radio telescope.

He added that pulsars have a strong gravitational field and are about the size of a small city, 20 kilometres in diameter.

"If you were to squash a 13-metre cube of steel down into a teaspoon — this is the density of a pulsar."

As pulsars spin, they emit a regular, clock-work radio beam — similar the light from lighthouse. Tiny fluctuations in the radio signals from the pulsar, known as PSR J1719-1438, suggested something was pulling on it.

Further information about the pulsar was collected by two other radio telescopes, one in England and the other in Hawaii. This revealed that a small companion planet is orbiting the pulsar every 2.2 hours.

Now in future I am sure we humans will bring that diamond on earth, may be we humans will fight who will the owner of that diamond and what will be the selling price of that diamond.

Reality views by sm –
Friday, August 26, 2011

Tags-News Science Planet Diamond Australia

Source – Daily Mail, http://www.newscientist.com, cbc.ca

3 comments:

Destination Infinity August 27, 2011  

If it is indeed diamond, and can be brought to earth, the price of diamond will fall steeply! Even if they bring it, they will lock it in some kind of underground vault and secure it with a lot of people guarding around it. These stones just have a perceived value, much less real value.

Anonymous,  October 16, 2011  

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