The strangest of the exoplanets is lemon-shaped and it can rain diamonds

A lemon shaped planet has been found in space. It was created by the immense gravity of the parent star, which has stretched the planet into an oval shape.

Astronomers say the ‘lemon planet’ will take the title of the strangest exoplanet discovered – at least for now.

The exoplanet has huge amounts of carbon that could crystallize. Then the planet could rain diamonds.

“When we received data from the planet, everyone had the same reaction. What the hell is this,” says the astronomer Peter Gao website according to Science Alert. He is a planetary scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.

An exoplanet called PSR J2322–2650b has been classified into a hot Jupiter. Such is a large Jupiter-like exoplanet that orbits close to its parent star and is therefore hot.

The lemon-shaped planet orbits a pulsar, i.e. a dense neutron star, which spins frantically around its axis.

The planet has carbon vapor in its atmosphere, and possibly helium in its interior.

The planet’s entire gas ring rotates rapidly, but in the opposite direction to the planet’s own direction of rotation around the parent star.

Exoplanets scientists are of course already used to the fact that there are really strange worlds in the universe.

There are exoplanets confirmed already over 6,000. Over the decades, i.e. after the beginning of the 1990s, for example, planets with metallic clouds and planets whose interior is largely diamond have been found.

However, it has been possible to understand the properties of the planets with the help of current scientific knowledge.

The characteristics of a lemon-shaped planet are something else. They don’t seem to match any known planetary development path.

The planet the parent star PSR J2322–2650 is about 750 light-years away. It is known as the millisecond pulsar.

The title is given when a neutron star, i.e. the collapsed core of a very massive star, rotates around its axis at high speeds. The rotation time is on the order of milliseconds.

At the same time, the neutron star emits strong radio and gamma rays from its poles, like a lighthouse. The pulse of its cone is very precise.

However, in 2017, a small disturbance was found in the radio pulse of the now studied parent star. That’s what led to the discovery of the lemon-shaped planet.

A space telescope James Webb and that devices that measure infrared radiation harnessed to explore the planet closely.

With Webb’s help, a flawless spectrum was captured from the planet’s gas atmosphere. The researchers also found out the speed and direction, temperature and composition of the winds in the gas atmosphere.

Thus, PSR J2322–2650b became the first exoplanet whose gas atmosphere has been studied near a pulsar.

The mass of the planet is about 80 percent of the mass of our own solar system’s giant planet Jupiter, and it orbits the Pulsar in 7.8 hours.

The pulsar’s strong gamma radiation heats the gas atmosphere to about 1,630 degrees Celsius.

A strange exoplanet further blurs the line between planet and star. It did not become a star because its mass was not enough to support nuclear fusion in the planet’s core.

So it cannot even be classified as a brown dwarf, which is a “failed” star.

The study was published by a scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.