A US-British team of astronomers has discovered the first planet with ultra-high concentrations of carbon.
The researchers say their discovery supports the idea there may be carbon-rich, rocky planets whose terrains are made up of diamonds or graphite.
"You might see land masses and mountains made up of diamonds," the lead researcher Dr Nikku Madhusudhan told BBC News.
The study in Nature journal raises new questions about how planets are formed.The work has been described as an astonishing astronomical tour de force.
They have detected the thermal radiation (heat) from a planet 1,200 light years away using Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope.
From this information they have calculated the composition of its atmosphere, according to Dr Marek Kukula of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London.
"It is absolutely astonishing that these scientists are able to start to tease out the details of what planets around other stars are made of," he said.
"The planet is thousands of times fainter than the star it orbits. So the scientists have to perform an amazing feat of precision measurement to extract anything at all. ...
via BBC News - 'Diamond exoplanet' idea boosted by telescope find.
No reason to doubt that there are diamond planets... but just keep in mind that an entire planet vanished once due to a miscalculation.
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