Astronomers have found a diamond half the size of Jupiter.
Like most planets outside our solar system, nobody’s seen it. In this case, the astronomers were looking at its parent star (a pulsar) and found that the star was being pulled slightly backwards and forwards by the mass of a planet, something as heavy as Jupiter and orbiting very close to the star indeed – just 600,000 kilometres, or 1.5 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. That’s so close that the star ought to be pulling it apart, especially if it were made of hydrogen, like Jupiter. So the planet must be small enough to stay out of the destruction zone, which means that it’s very dense.
Meanwhile, the pulsar is spinning extremely rapidly, so fast that it suggests that it’s pulled mass from a companion star – but there’s no star there now, just the diamond planet So the theory is that the pulsar pulled the outer atmosphere off a companion star, leaving behind a dense core made of carbon. And the carbon is so dense that it must be diamond.
Astronomers are divided on whether it’s actually sparkly.
