Dec. 9: Astronomers led by Indian American, Mr Nikku Madhusudhan, have discovered a giant planet with an atmosphere and core dominated by carbon, raising the prospect that diamond-studded stars may exist.
Mr 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 2300ºC — hot enough to melt stainless steel, the scientists said in the journal Nature. A computational technique developed two years ago by Mr 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 Mr 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 that Earth needs for revolution. While one side of WASP-12b always faces the star and is daylit, and the other is always dark.