‘The Dish’ finds a ‘diamond planet’

They imagine arriving at a planet where diamond abounds, the small problem is the great distance that does not separate it and another problem is that this exoplanet orbits a pulsars that is a neotron star that is hotter than our sun and most likely is that we die carcinated before reaching the planet.

Astronomers using 'The Dish' – CSIRO's radio telescope near Parkes, NSW – believe they've found a small planet made of diamond, orbiting an unusual star. The discovery was made by an international research team, led by Professor Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, and is reported today in the journal Science.

“Although bizarre, this planet is evidence that we’ve got the right understanding of how these binary systems evolve,” said Dr Michael Keith of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, one of the research team members.

The researchers, from Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA, first found an unusual star called a pulsar, now named PSR J1719-1438, using the 64-m Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia.

Pulsars are small spinning stars about 20 km in diameter – the size of a small city – 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.

The researchers followed up their discovery with the Lovell radio telescope in the UK and one of the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, and noticed that the arrival times of the pulsar’s pulses were systematically altered – in a way that must be caused by the gravitational pull of a small planet orbiting the pulsar.