Scientists found a giant space diamond!

[Jstas]

From BBC:


Diamond star thrills astronomers


A diamond that is almost forever

Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.

The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.

Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Twinkle twinkle

"You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.

The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa.

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.

Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system.

"Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3492919.stm?ref=nf

[ShinAce]

Rehashed story from 2004:
http://www.universetoday.com/9295/as...mond-in-space/

[sm88]

Single women around the world will officially raise their standards for bachelors in light of this news. Hide your wallets!

[nooshinjohn]

Liz Taylor has already purchased it...

[Knucklehead]

hope it falls in m y backyard! :p

[Jstas]

hope it falls in m y backyard! :p

Something that size won't fall "in" but rather "on" your backyard as well as every other yard in the state of Virginia!

[zingo]

But because of its unusually high mass — 1.1 times that of the sun's — Lucy is a whopper. It measures only 2,500 miles across (less than one-third the size of Earth) yet weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, making it the largest dwarf yet identified.

In converting that weight into carats, astronomers came up with 10 billion trillion trillion, a number that would put it somewhere north of whatever rock Melania Trump is wearing on her finger these days.

[nooshinjohn]

But because of its unusually high mass — 1.1 times that of the sun's — Lucy is a whopper. It measures only 2,500 miles across (less than one-third the size of Earth) yet weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, making it the largest dwarf yet identified.

In converting that weight into carats, astronomers came up with 10 billion trillion trillion, a number that would put it somewhere north of whatever rock Melania Trump is wearing on her finger these days.

...Dateline Washington...


Nasa and the Office of Management & Budget(OMB) have announced an ambitious plan to mine the newly discovered "Diamond Star" in an effort to use those resources to pay off the national debt:D....

[cstmar01]

Was this a woman who made the discovery shortly after she was complaining to her man that he didn't buy her a big enough rock?

Seriously why post this? Its just going to have women calling to their man that they need a bigger rock... ;)

and people that are single like me sad to know that in the future all purchases will be compared to this.... :(