Diamond-studded planet, the latest ‘priceless’ find
Astronomers led by Indian American Nikku Madhusudhan have discovered
a giant planet with an atmosphere and core dominated by carbon, raising
the prospect that diamond-studded stars may exist.
Madhusudan, a Banaras Hindu University (BHU) alumnus now at Princeton
University, New Jersey, and his colleagues have observed that an
extremely hot planet discovered last year has more carbon than oxygen -
a feature never observed on a planet until now.
The planet, called WASP-12b, orbits a star about 1,200 light-years
from Earth, and appears to have temperatures of nearly 2300°C - hot
enough to melt stainless steel, the scientists said in the journal
Nature.
A computational technique developed two years ago by Madhusudan while
he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge,
Massachusetts, was used to analyse the atmosphere of the planet.
Like Jupiter, WASP-12b is made largely of gas, only its core contains
carbon-based minerals such as diamonds and graphite, said Madhusudhan
now a postdoctoral scientist in the department of astrophysical sciences
at Princeton.
“A carbon-rich planet has dramatic implications for its interior, its
atmosphere, and may compel us to rethink our long-ingrained ideas of
planetary formation,” he said.
The planet-larger than Jupiter-is windy, blazing hot and so near its
star that it circles in a single day compared with the 365 needed for
Earth to go round the sun.
While one side of WASP-12b always faces the star and is daylit, and
the other is always dark, the planet’s strong winds and gaseous nature
distribute energy and keep both sides equally warm.
With that much hotness and no solid surface, WASP-12b couldn’t
support life, Madhusudhan said. That doesn’t mean that other carbon
planets are devoid of life, he said.“If life exists on such planets, it
has to be able to sustain low oxygen, low water and lots of methane and
other hydrocarbons” that would be in the atmosphere, he said.
If there are other planets with more carbon than oxygen, and some
have rocky surfaces instead of gaseous ones, such orbs may have rocks
made of diamonds and graphite, instead of silicon and oxygen found on
Earth, Madhusudhan said, and sand there may be as rare as diamonds are
on Earth.
Scientists used US space agency NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to
observe light emitted by the planet WASP12, discovered in 2009 by
researchers in the UK-based consortium called Wide Angle Search for
Planets (WASP).
Indo-Asian News Service
|