'Diamond-studded' planet found

Astronomers led by Indian-American Nikku Madhusudhan have discovered a giant planet with an atmosphere and core dominated by carbon, raising the prospect that diamond-studded stars may exist.
Madhusudhan, a Banaras Hindu University (BHU) alumnus now at Princeton University, and his colleagues have observed that an extremely hot planet discovered last year has more carbon than oxygen - a feature never observed on a planet until now.
The planet, called WASP-12b, orbits a star about 1,200 light-years from Earth, and appears to have temperatures of nearly 2300°C - hot enough to melt stainless steel, the scientists said in the journal Nature.
A computational technique developed two years ago by Madhusudhan while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, was used to analyse the atmosphere of the planet.
Like Jupiter, WASP-12b is made largely of gas, only its core contains carbon-based minerals such as diamonds and graphite, said Madhusudhan, now a postdoctoral scientist in the department of astrophysical sciences at Princeton.