STANG KILLA SS
~THE SCALE SHOP~
its a few years old news(2004), but i just came across this while watching modern marvels and found some info online.
"Known officially as BPM 37093, the star confirms a theory, first raised in the early 1960s, that cool white dwarfs have a diamond core.
Confirming what the Beatles always knew, astronomers have actually found a diamond in the sky - directly above Australia. It is the biggest known diamond in the universe, in fact.
According to American astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a white dwarf star in the constellation of Centaurus, next to the Southern Cross, has been found to have a 3000-kilometre-wide core of crystallised carbon, or diamond.
It weighs 2.27 thousand trillion trillion tonnes - that's 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a 1 followed by 34 zeroes. The biggest earthly jewel is one of the British crown jewels, the 530-carat Star of Africa.
However, this cosmic jewel is hidden beneath a layer of hydrogen and helium gases, with the diamond core making up between 50 and 90 per cent of its mass. "It's the mother of all diamonds," said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, who led the team of researchers that studied the star.
"Some people refer to it as Lucy, in a tribute to the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
A white dwarf is what small stars, those up to about the size of the sun, turn into when they run out of nuclear fuel and die.
The intense pressures at the heart of such dead stars compress the carbon into diamond.
Millions of years ago Lucy was as bright as any star, but now generates only 0.06 percent of the light of our sun. As goes Lucy, so will go the sun — in about 5 billion years.
"Known officially as BPM 37093, the star confirms a theory, first raised in the early 1960s, that cool white dwarfs have a diamond core.
Confirming what the Beatles always knew, astronomers have actually found a diamond in the sky - directly above Australia. It is the biggest known diamond in the universe, in fact.
According to American astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a white dwarf star in the constellation of Centaurus, next to the Southern Cross, has been found to have a 3000-kilometre-wide core of crystallised carbon, or diamond.
It weighs 2.27 thousand trillion trillion tonnes - that's 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a 1 followed by 34 zeroes. The biggest earthly jewel is one of the British crown jewels, the 530-carat Star of Africa.
However, this cosmic jewel is hidden beneath a layer of hydrogen and helium gases, with the diamond core making up between 50 and 90 per cent of its mass. "It's the mother of all diamonds," said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, who led the team of researchers that studied the star.
"Some people refer to it as Lucy, in a tribute to the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
A white dwarf is what small stars, those up to about the size of the sun, turn into when they run out of nuclear fuel and die.
The intense pressures at the heart of such dead stars compress the carbon into diamond.
Millions of years ago Lucy was as bright as any star, but now generates only 0.06 percent of the light of our sun. As goes Lucy, so will go the sun — in about 5 billion years.
