LONDON - Forget the diamond as big as the Ritz. This one's bigger than planet Earth.
Orbiting a star that is visible to the naked eye, astronomers
have discovered a planet twice the size of our own made largely out of
diamond.
The rocky planet, called '55 Cancri e', orbits a sun-like star
in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there
lasts a mere 18 hours.
Discovered by a U.S.-Franco research team, its radius is twice
that of Earth's but it is much more dense with a mass eight times
greater. It is also incredibly hot, with temperatures on its surface
reaching 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit (1,648 Celsius).
"The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and
diamond rather than water and granite," said Nikku Madhusudhan, the Yale
researcher whose findings are due to be published in the journal
Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The study - with Olivier Mousis at the Institut de Recherche
en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France - estimates that at
least a third of the planet's mass, the equivalent of about three Earth
masses, could be diamond.
Diamond planets have been spotted before but this is the first
time one has been seen orbiting a sun-like star and studied in such
detail.
"This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a
fundamentally different chemistry from Earth," Madhusudhan said, adding
that the discovery of the carbon-rich planet meant distant rocky planets
could no longer be assumed to have chemical constituents, interiors,
atmospheres, or biologies similar to Earth.
David Spergel, an astronomer at Princeton University, said it
was relatively simple to work out the basic structure and history of a
star once you know its mass and age.
"Planets are much more complex. This 'diamond-rich
super-Earth' is likely just one example of the rich sets of discoveries
that await us as we begin to explore planets around nearby stars."
"Nearby" is a relative concept in astronomy. Any
fortune-hunter not dissuaded by "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz",
F.Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age morality tale of thwarted greed, will find
Cancri e about 40 light years, or 230 trillion miles, from Park Avenue.
NEW WONDER OF THE WORLD ! Science, Fiction, or 'Alienic'..?
#SLD-News-Nature
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