It’s been just revealed that an amazing discovery has been made and it involves something beyond anything that’s in our solar system.
Missions such as NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, TESS, and more continue to offer us insights into the properties of exoplanets, experts are working hard to put together the available elements that are showing what these planets might be looking like, what’s they’re made of and whether they are habitable or not.
SciTechDaily notes that there’s a new study that’s published in The Planetary Science Journal, a team of experts from Arizona State University and the University of Chicago has determined that some carbon-rich exoplanets could be made of diamonds and silica.
“These exoplanets are unlike anything in our solar system,” according to the lead author Harrison Allen-Sutter of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
According to the online publication mentioned above, when the planets and stars are formed, they are doing this from the very same cloud of gas and their bulk compositions are quite similar.
It’s important to note that a star with a lower carbon-to-oxygen ratio will have planets such as Earth which are made of silicates and oxides and every small content of diamond – the content of our planet is about 0.001%.
Exoplanets around stars with a higher carbon-to-oxygen ratio
On the other hand, according to the same notes “exoplanets around stars with a higher carbon-to-oxygen ratio than our sun are more likely to be carbon-rich.”
Allen-Sutter and co-authors Emily Garhart, Kurt Leinenweber, and Dan Shim of ASU, with Vitali Prakapenka and Eran Greenberg of the University of Chicago, are currently debating the fact that these carbon-rich exoplanets could convert to diamond and silicate.
This could be only happening water were present, creating a diamond-rich composition.
The online publication also brings up what experts did in order to test this hypothesis and we recommend that you check out the original article in order to find out.
