New Diamond Find?

The recent reports of possible rough diamond shortages due to the fact no major resource discoveries have been made recently may have been premature. A new source may have been found with only one shortcoming, its distance from any manufacturing or processing centre.

That new supply is not in any of the familiar diamond regions, Canada, South Africa, Russia etc. but rather a distant planet. Astronomers recently discovered a planet largely made of crystallized carbon, more commonly called diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon, i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

The planet is 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the centre of the Milky Way from the Earth. The planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars, only about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter, that spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of electromagnetic radiation.

The planet orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the Journal Science on Thursday