
Not a diamond in the rough, just a rough diamond.
Once upon a time, there was a bad sci-fi movie called Fatal Conflict in which Kari Wuhrer and some other B-movie actors stopped a mad man’s plot to destroy the Earth. Among the more interesting aspects of the film is the fact that gold is worthless due to a mountain of gold discovered in Antarctica. (I am not making this up.) It’s laughable, right? Well, wrong. Astronomers have recently discovered a planet made of diamonds within telescope view of Earth.
It sounds crazy, but it’s not. Matthew Bailes and his fellow astronomers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne were using the nearby CSIRO Parkes radio telescope to monitor a pulsar–a dead star that gives off radio waves–when they discovered something unusual. There was a slight hitch in the pulsar’s pulsing, which would indicate an object in orbit around the dead star. As it turns out, that thing is a planet in the Serpens constellation with the mass of Jupiter that orbits about 1.5 moon distances away from the pulsar. Due to its density and carbon basis, astronomers believe that the planet is simply one large diamond.
The idea of a planet made of diamonds seems like a stretch, but the president of the New York City chapter of the Diamond Dealers Club is ready for it (while refusing to speculate on its value). “If there’s some way to transport it to New York and cut it, it doesn’t make a difference if it’s from inner space or outer space,” said Moshe Mosbacher.
Tags: planet made of diamonds, diamond planet, Matthew Bailes, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, unusual planets, space, astronomy, diamond planet discovered, Moshe Mosbacher, Diamond Dealers Club, New York City, carbon diamond planet, pulsar, diamond with the mass of Jupiter, serpens constellation