A Diamond called Lucy
Imagine a diamond that is 10 billion trillion trillion carats. Sounds like I made up that number, heh? Well, Astronomers believe that there is a diamond that big and they believe that they have found it. They named it Lucy, after the Beatles’ song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon.
For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.
The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.
“By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth.
We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond,” says Metcalfe.
If we were able to mine such a diamond the price of diamonds would become dirt cheap. Everyone would have a diamond. The astronomers predict that our sun will become a white dwarf, in about 5 billion years. 2 billion years after that our sun should be ready for mining.
February 20th, 2004 at 1:50 pm
They’d also be dirt cheap if DeBeers released the tons of diamonds he has stashed in his vaults. They are after all just rocks!