A girl's cosmic best friend
Kimora's next home? Scientists discover a fabulous diamond planet with secrets
This artist's concept shows the searing-hot gas planet WASP-12b (orange orb) andits star. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope discovered that the planet has morecarbon than oxygen, making it the first carbon-rich planet ever observed.artist's rendition via NASA
Kimora Lee is waiting to move in.
When we imagined alien life on distant planets, perhaps we should have pictured ice queens skating in a sparkly world of diamond mountains, graphite forests and glass plains.
That's how scientists say a newly-discovered planet 1,200 light years away might look. WASP-12b is slightly larger than Jupiter but 50 times as close to its star, making it much hotter.
Most importantly, the carbon-to-oxygen ratio in the atmosphere is twice that of most similar planets at about 1:1, giving it a fundamental difference in make up from silicon-based planets like Earth, creating the possibility of giant geographic features like mountains made of carbon-based diamond and graphite. And with WASP-12b's elevated levels of methane, scientists are left to imagine alternate forms of life that exist there to produce via metabolism the carbon-and-hydrogen gas.
OK, technically, scientists admit that WASP-12b is too big, too hot and too gaseous to support life — or diamonds. But its composition makes scientists believe there could be other planets that fit the description — even in the same solar system.
"It's the first carbon-rich planet ever found," says Princeton postdoctoral planet researcher Nikku Madhusudhan, part of the team that made the discovery. "Now that we've found one, we know there may be a lot more out there."
It wouldn't be the first diamond discovered in space. In 2004, researchers identified a former white dwarf star that has compressed and hardened into a giant diamond 25,000 miles across — or 10 billion trillion trillion carats. They named it Lucy, as in "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds," the famous Beatles song.
