OUR COSMOS

Astronomers find a huge diamond in space

Some people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

A cosmic diamond - a chunk of crystallized carbon 4000 kilometres across - has been discovered 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
The huge cosmic gem (BPM 37093) is a crystallized 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 and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.
For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently. Measuring the dwarf's pulsations uncovered its hidden interior - the carbon interior had solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond.
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 crystallize as well, leaving a giant diamond in the center of our solar system.
A paper announcing this discovery has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication.