CAJ - 55 Cancri e

Hey guys!

This is my second CAJ blog post and it deals with a very interesting planet. I am aware that my main topic is asteroid mining but I read something that is so cool that I could not resist to blog about it.

Imagine a planet that is completely covered with diamonds. Sounds great, doesn’t it? If you discovered this planet and were allowed to mine it what would you do with all the diamonds? Would you start wearing jewellery like this:

Or use it for other purposes:

What would you say if I told you that there is a planet in the universe that consists of one third of pure diamonds? You won’t believe me? Here we go:

The planet 55 Cancri e was discovered in 2004 by scientists and its surface is believed to be covered with graphite and diamonds. 55 Cancri e is 40 light years, which are about 125 091 648 000 kilometres, away from our solar system. Compared to the distance between the earth and the moon, which is “only” 1.3 light seconds, 55 Cancri e is a very remote planet and it would take a long time to get there. For this reason it was not yet possible to land on the planet but scientists managed to compute the size and volume of it. 55 Cacri e is twice the size of the earth and eight times heavier. It is orbiting a sun like star very closely and therefore a year on this planet lasts only 18 hours. Due to its closeness it can get very hot on 55 Cancri e, 2000° Celsius and more are normal temperatures. If scientists were able to mine the planet, diamonds would probably become very cheap on earth and nearly everyone could afford them.

Although this sounds very promising and astronomers are very interested in exploring the diamond planet and taking probes of it, it could take a long time until they finally manage to do so because of the position and the high temperature on 55 Cancri e.