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 an unusual star known as 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.
A newly discovered alien planet that formed from a dead star is a real diamond in the rough.
The super-high pressure of the planet, which orbits a rapidly pulsing neutron star, has likely caused the carbon within it to crystallize into an actual diamond, a new study suggests.
The composition of the planet, which is about five times the size of Earth, is not its only outstanding feature.
The planet's parent star is a special kind of flashing star known as a millisecond pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star formed from a supernova. The entire system, which is only the second of its kind ever discovered, is located about 4,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Serpens (The Snake).
A gem of a find
Seventy percent of millisecond pulsars found have a companion, which provides additional energy to ramp up the pulsars' rapid rotation. Generally, this companion is a dying star called a white dwarf ; more than 180 millisecond pulsars have been found with white dwarfs over the years.
The only planet known to be orbiting in such a system was detected in 1992 — until now. "The pulsar was found in December 2009," lead scientist Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, told Space.com via email. "We've been on the trail of the companion ever since."
From the ashes of a supernova
Known as PSR J1719-1438, this particular pulsar completes more than 10,000 rotations in a minute. Tiny and compact, it's only about 12 miles across, but it has a mass that is 1.4 times that of our sun.
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PSR J1719-1438 transformed from an average star to a radio pulsar when a dying star in a binary system exploded. The compact core of the star formed with a very high rotation speed from the ashes of the supernova.
