Friday, April 15, 2005
Diamond Bust
It may be a good time to pawn your "rocks." A diamond star discovered last year hovers in the southern skies (see Bling, Bling Star). Now American scientists are saying that some of the 154 extrasolar planets found over the last decade could be also made of diamond. They said that such planets could be located even around stars like our Sun.
Marc Kuchner of Princeton University and Sara Seager of the Carnegie Institution in Washington said in a brand new paper that there could be low-mass extrasolar planets - smaller than 60 times the Earth's mass - rich in silicon carbide and other carbon compounds. "Although graphite should emerge as a surface layer in a differentiated carbon planet, a few kilometers into the planet's interior... pure carbon in a cool carbon planet should turn to diamond."
Kuchner and Seager got the idea to look for carbon planets from recent research done on the birth of Jupiter. Data suggested that Jupiter formed in a carbon-rich part of the primordial solar nebula and that Jupiter's embryo was a carbon planet. "If Jupiter could have formed from a carbon-rich embryo, we would expect that carbon-rich embryos should be relatively common and occassionaly observable as planets," they wrote.
Marc Kuchner of Princeton University and Sara Seager of the Carnegie Institution in Washington said in a brand new paper that there could be low-mass extrasolar planets - smaller than 60 times the Earth's mass - rich in silicon carbide and other carbon compounds. "Although graphite should emerge as a surface layer in a differentiated carbon planet, a few kilometers into the planet's interior... pure carbon in a cool carbon planet should turn to diamond."
Kuchner and Seager got the idea to look for carbon planets from recent research done on the birth of Jupiter. Data suggested that Jupiter formed in a carbon-rich part of the primordial solar nebula and that Jupiter's embryo was a carbon planet. "If Jupiter could have formed from a carbon-rich embryo, we would expect that carbon-rich embryos should be relatively common and occassionaly observable as planets," they wrote.
