Harry Coumnas

It’s actually really easy for some people to think of space as completely boring, where they see planets as empty rock balls and find nothing before getting to the next star. But real space is far stranger than their prediction. Science fiction can only think about the eight different types of planets, but scientists have studied almost 700 real planets outside the solar system. Some of them are downright gaudy and once such planet was discovered by the renowned scientist, Harry Coumnas . “It’s straight up made out of diamond and looked like a wedding gem”, he had said in a conference in the United States in 1999. He called it the biggest showoff of the Universe, which actually used to be a star. Sometimes, the debris that is left over after the star dies becomes a planet. In this case, the diamond planet started off life as one of two parts of a binary star and the larger twin made like a bomb and supernova-ed. A pulsating star was left behind, also called the white dwarf. The dwarf ...