The Biggest Diamond Not On Earth
3/23/2009 6:36:29 AM Suzanne Gannon
The largest diamond in the universe is not in a museum. It is not at a jewelry store. It is not dangling on the finger of Bill Gates’ wife. It makes the largest diamond previously known, the 530-carat Star of Africa diamond, seem like a grain of sand. If you were to make it into an engagement ring, you would need all the gold on earth to set it in. and then some.
The largest diamond in the universe has been approximated at 10 billion trillion trillion carats, and it is still in the sky. Astronomers have named it “Lucy” after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. “You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond”, according to Travis Metcalfe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
This huge diamond is actually a crystallized white dwarf—the core of a star once the star dies. It is mostly made of carbon, with an outer shell of hydrogen and helium gases. The team of researchers who discovered Lucy—whose technical name is BPM 37093—estimate it to be 2,500 miles across and weigh 5 billion trillion trillion pounds, which would make it a whopping 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That number looks like this:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Michael Montgomery of the University of Cambridge worked with Metcalfe and Antonio Kanaan of the University of Brazil to examine the exact nature of BPM 37093. He said: “The hunt for the crystal core of this white dwarf has been like the search for the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. It was thought to exist for decades, but only now has it been located”.
Our sun will probably live another 5 billion years, and then, having used up all of its nuclear fuel, will die. After taking 2 billion years or so to cool and crystallize, it will become an enormous diamond in the middle of our solar system.
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