Astronomers think they’ve found a star that was transformed and condensed into a planet made of solid diamond. An international research team made the discovery with scientists from Australia, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
The team was able to detect the “diamond planet” with the 64-meter radio telescope in Parkes, Australia, and found that it orbits an unusual star known as a pulsar. The astronomers consolidated their findings with follow-up observations with the Lovell radio telescope in the United Kingdom and one of the Keck telescopes on Hawaii. The pulsar and its planet lie 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. The system is about a seventh of the way toward the galactic center from Earth and is part of the Milky Way’s plane of stars.
Pulsars are small spinning stars the size of cities like Cologne that emit a beam of radio waves. As the star spins and the radio beam sweeps repeatedly over Earth, radio telescopes detect a regular pattern of radio pulses.
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