A team of astronomers have discovered Tuesday what could easily be the coldest star ever detected in the cosmos. It hovers about 900 million light years away in space near a much larger companion pulsar dubbed as PSR J2222-0137.

The remnant of a dead star, the white dwarf is a tiny star estimated to be as old as the Milky Way Galaxy, about 11 billion years old. Its temperature is estimated to be roughly around 3,000 degrees Kelvin or 2,700 degrees Celsius, which is comparatively cooler than the Sun by 5,000 times.

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At the estimated temperature, the astronomers believe that the white dwarf's carbon has crystallized to form a diamond the size of the Earth in space.

"These things should be out there, but because they are so dim they are very hard to find," said David Kaplan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who led the team of astronomers that discovered the stellar gem.

The end state of stars, white dwarfs are extremely dense objects that burn what remains of their nuclear fuel for billions of years. On their own, these collapsed stars are extremely hard to detect, since they have very low intrinsic brightness unidentifiable to infrared and optical telescopes on Earth.

With the use of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Green Bank Telescope and Very Long Baseline Array, Kaplan and his colleagues worked out the location of the white dwarf after detecting rather suspicious radio wave pulses towards the direction of the constellation Aquarius.

Notably, the white dwarf has yet to be observed. Its gravitational data, however, makes its existence a virtual certainty.

"Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star, and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf," said Barat Dunlap a member of the research team.

"But we didn't see a thing. If there's a white dwarf there - and there almost certainly is - it must be extremely cold."

Tagsdiamond-like star, dead star, white dwarf, earth-sized diamond star