Diamond Planet Discovered - Space Race On
I can see it now. Suddenly NASA gets new funding to send probes to the recently discovered diamond planet called “55 Cancri e”. Here’s an excerpt from the story in Yale News:
“New research led by Yale University scientists suggests that a rocky planet twice Earth's size orbiting a nearby star is a diamond planet.
“This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth,” said lead researcher Nikku Madhusudhan, a Yale postdoctoral researcher in physics and astronomy. “The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite.”
See the full story at https://news.yale.edu/2012/10/11/nearby-super-earth-likely-diamond-planet.