Astronomers discover planet made of diamonds

It is certainly what you could call a gem of a discovery.

Astronomers believe they have found an entire planet made of diamonds.

Scientists at the University of Manchester think they have unearthed a once-massive star in the Milky Way that has been transformed into a small planet made of the precious rock.

The diamond planet - the shrunken core of a once-huge
star - is a chunk of crystallised carbon measuring
40,000 miles across, five times the diameter of Earth.

The international research team first detected an unusual star, called a pulsar, and followed up their discovery with research using a telescope based in an observatory in Cheshire.

 
The findings led the scientists to discover the gravitational pull of a small companion planet orbiting the pulsar.

Pulsars are small spinning stars more than ten miles in diameter – the size of a small city – that emit a beam of radio waves.

The team, also made up of scientists from Australia, Germany, Italy and the United States, thinks that the ‘diamond planet’ is all that remains of the original star, most of whose matter was siphoned off towards the pulsar.

The companion planet is small, at less than 40,000 miles wide – about five times the diameter of Earth.

 
But it is so close to the pulsar that if it were any bigger it would be ripped apart by the gravitational force of the star, which rotates more than 10,000 times per minute and has a mass of about 1.4 times that of the sun.

Research team member Dr Michael Keith said: 'This remnant is likely to be largely carbon and oxygen, because a star made of lighter elements like hydrogen and helium would be too big to fit the measured orbiting times.'

The density means that this material is certain to be crystalline, that is, a large part of the star may be similar to a diamond.

The pulsar, dubbed PSR J1719-1438, and its planet are part of the Milky Way's plane of stars and lie 4,000 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens - the Snake.

The modulations in the radio pulses told astronomers a number of things about the planet.

It orbits the pulsar in just two hours and ten minutes, and the distance between the two objects is about 373,000 miles - a little less than the radius of our sun.

Despite its small size, the planet has slightly more mass than Jupiter.
 
About 70 per cent of millisecond pulsars have companions of some kind. 
 
Astronomers think it is the companion that, in its star form, transforms an old, dead pulsar into a millisecond pulsar by transferring matter and spinning it up to a very high speed.

The result is a fast-spinning millisecond pulsar with a shrunken companion - most often a so-called white dwarf.

source: dailymail

Candle flame contains millions of tiny diamonds

As if a candlelit dinner wasn’t romantic enough.

Scientists have shown that a flickering flame is studded with millions of tiny diamonds. Roughly 1.5million of the twinkling gems are created every second.

Sadly, for those whose eyes are lighting up the thought of making a fortune, the jewels are so small that up to 300,000 would fit on the head of a pin. And they disappear in the blink of an eye.

But if scientists come up with a way of harnessing the technology, people could use little more than a candle and a match to ‘grow’ diamonds from scratch. As well as costing a fraction of the price of ‘real’ diamonds, they would be an ethically sound alternative to the blood diamonds mined in African war zones.

An alternative source of diamonds would also be a boon to industry, which uses the fantastically hard stones in everything from saw blades to prosthetic hips.

The idea comes from a St Andrews University scientist challenged to find out just what is inside a flame.

Wuzong Zhou, a professor of chemistry, said: ‘A colleague from another university said to me: "Of course, no one knows what a candle flame is actually made of."

‘I told him I believed science could explain everything eventually, so I decided to find out.’

The professor invented a filter that allowed him to successfully extract particles from the centre of the flame, where temperatures top 1,400C, and then examined them.'

To his surprise, he discovered that the carbon in the candle wax had formed all four types of pure carbon, including diamonds and graphite, or pencil lead.

Pure carbon can make very different structures depending on how the atoms are arranged and how they bond to each other.

Professor Zhou said: ‘This was a surprise because each form is usually created under different conditions.

‘Unfortunately, the diamond particles are burned away in the process and converted into carbon dioxide, but this will change the way we view a candle flame forever.’

source: dailymail