Here’s something fun: imagine a diamond the size of Jupiter. Actually, you don’t have to: it exists, and it’s about 4,000 light years away in Serpens, orbiting a millisecond pulsar.
How’d it happen? Well, technically, the planet in question is the core of a white dwarf star. Millisecond pulsars and white dwarf stars go together like fat kids and Cake, but the inevitable problem is the pulsar will chow down on the white dwarf. What astronomers believe happened is the pulsar snacked on a good chunk of the white dwarf, but a “small” piece of it got loose, settled into a planetary orbit…and since it was made entire of carbon, the massive pressures exerted by being around an extremely dense thing that spins really fast took care of the rest.
Now, the question is, can we get there, survive, claim it, and start mining it?
[ via the xenogeologists at Space.com ]