Diamond Star Found

You may have heard of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e.  Not a catchy name, but you probably know it as the diamond planet.  Now, it looks like there's a diamond star to go with it.  We would have never found it were it not for its companion, PSR-J2222-0137, which is a pulsar.  Pulsars are very precise things, and while observing this one, astronomers noticed significant warping was delaying the pulses.  Because of the exact nature of the pulses, scientists were able to determine the exact mass of the objects.  The pulsar was 1.2 solar masses, while the companion is 1.05 solar masses. 

An object of that mass is probably a white dwarf, so we looked for one.  But we couldn't find one.  The resolution would have shown a star 10 times fainter than any previously known white dwarf, but there was nothing there.  There is an object there, but we can't see it.  It's been theorized that white dwarfs will slowly cool off into what is known as a black dwarf, but we've never seen one, because they're black (obviously) and they don't have the extreme gravitational pull a black hole does.  We only found this one because it's in orbit around a pulsar.  The star is still pretty hot at nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the carbon has crystallized, which is why we'll inevitably call this a diamond star.

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