The Biggest Diamond in the World and Universe

Scientists Discover Dwarf Star with Diamond Center - Comparison BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star

Imagine a ten billion, trillion, trillion carat diamond. That’s not a typo – it’s the actual size of the largest diamond known to humankind today. This diamond would certainly be worth a sum so great, no person or nation could afford to buy it. Fortunately for those who can’t stand to be outclassed, this gigantic diamond is entirely off limits to everyone.The mega-diamond is located in the center of a white dwarf star referred to as BPM 37093, located in the Centaurus constellation. It is situated at a distance approximately 17 light years from Earth. In case you would like to do the math, a light year is about 6 trillion miles. BPM 37093 is the white dwarf’s official name, but scientists also refer to it as “Wikantra”.


A Diamond of a Completely Different Class
Compared to the largest diamond every found on earth, the BPM 37093 diamond is on a completely different scale. In 1905, a 3,106-carat diamond was found on Earth. It was later cut into the “Star of Africa,” but compared to astronomer’s latest discovery, it’s a rather pathetic star indeed.
Earthlings being what they are, many will probably enjoy fantasizing about the worth of this incredible diamond. Scientists on the other hand are concerned (as usual) with much more practical and interesting matters.
BPM 37093 has amazed and delighted astronomers who for decades have been theorizing such a thing could happen. Now, they finally have proof that when white dwarf stars cool, their centers are crystallized into gigantic carbon diamonds. The astonomers’ findings could also have an impact in terms of assessments of the age of our galaxy and universe.
The astronomers responsible for the discovery are from Iowa State University. The group of 50 scientists specializing in astronomy was led by Iowa State University professor of physics and astronomy, Steve Kawaler. To observe and monitor the dwarf star, the team used Whole Earth Telescope data as well as that captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Kawaler is the director of Whole Earth Telescope, which is headquartered at Iowa State University.
The Hubble Telescope orbits the Earth. Turned in the direction of BPM 37093, it was able to provide very sensitive and valuable astronomical data about the dwarf star. The Whole Earth Telescope consists of 22 Earth-based telescopes and observatories located throughout the world which monitor stars 24 hours a day. To analyze the dwarf star as comprehensively as possible, measurements from WET telescopes located in South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Australia and New Zealand were used.

The Creation of a Cosmos-sized Diamond
How exactly did a star like BPM 37093 come to have a humungous diamond at its core? It’s a fascinating process that happens to a certain type of stars known as main sequence stars, of which our sun is a member.
Over time, main sequence stars burn their hydrogen, helium and other gases. During the process, they begin expanding. During expansion, they are transformed into huge red giant stars. Eventually, red giant stars lose their outer of shell of gases and only a very hot core remains.
This 180,000 F hot core slowly begins to cool. During the cooling process, fusion reactions create increasingly heavier elements. Eventually, all that remains is a tiny amount of oxygen and carbon, and according to the theory, that’s when crystallization occurs.
Although this cooling phase lasts billions of years, scientists have never been able to confirm the theory because there is no way to detect or study a crystallized dwarf star. During the start of the cooling phase, stars pulsate as they burn helium. These light and sound pulsations are detectable, but they cease once crystallization has occurred.
BPM 37093 is different. It is the biggest dwarf star scientists are aware of, and it is so large that crystallization of the core is starting even as pulsations are still occurring. Scientists can use this pulse data to analyze the interior of the dwarf star. They have determined that the core of this unique dwarf star is already crystallized, and they have even been able to measure this gigantic diamond.
Based on the data they’ve collected, the astronomers believe BPM 37093 has a blue-green tint. They base this assessment on the conclusion that the core of the dead dwarf star is largely composed of carbon and oxygen. Blue-green is the color diamond these constituents would be expected to produce.

Our Sun, Forever Bright
Anyone who has ever wondered what exactly will become of our own Sun star now knows. It will be approximately 5 billion years before our Sun dies, and it will take another 2 billion for it to form a diamond core like BPM 37093. But eventually the Sun will also cool and create a gigantic diamond at its core.

BPM 37093 Wikantra Planet - You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond

Apparently this is old news now. However, I just recently heard of it, and find it fascinating. Here is the story of the largest known diamond in our galaxy.
On Friday, 13th February, 2004, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe, released information about their latest discovery – a10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond.
The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon, the size of our Moon, 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is 4000kms wide and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds or 10 billion trillion trillion carats.

“You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond!” says astronomer Travis Metcalfe who leads the team of researchers that discovered the giant gem. The diamond has been called ‘Wikantra’, Technically known as BPM 37093 or Wikantra Planet, this huge cosmic gem, is actually 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.

The white dwarf is not only radiant but also harmonious. It rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations. For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently. “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,” says co-researcher Michael Montgomery.
The problem with proving the theory about the crystallization is that by the time the star has crystallized, it is no longer pulsating and is so cool, that they are impossible to detect. But BPM 37093 is so massive, that the star is crystallizing on the inside, as white light and sound continue to pulsate from the surface. The vibrations are detectable as colour shifts in the visible light emanating from the star. In this case, the right frequency makes it a diamond – blue green in tint.
“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.

Scientist Vince Ford, of the Australian National University’s Mount Stromio Observatory, said “This huge …..thing is sitting right down in the southern sky, in the constellation of Centaurus, just near the Southern Cross”. At approximately 4000kms in diameter, Lucy is roughly the same size as Australia and completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 530-carat Star of Africa that resides in the Crown Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,100-carat gem.
Our Sun will also 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 centre of our solar system. The Sun is part of a group of stars called main sequence stars and most of these end their lives as white dwarves.
Sirius B, which is a known white Dwarf star, will also be a diamond in the future. Sirius B is currently around 25,000 degrees on the surface, and will begin to crystallize when it has cooled to about half that temperature.
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–reprised from Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian, 2-13-2004
It’s interesting to me, to imagine the possibility of somehow capturing this dead star and bringing it back to earth, where we value diamond as a rare commodity. Yet considering it’s great size, such an object brought to earth, would depreciate itself by its veritable massiveness. Scarcity is what increases value. A diamond the size of Australia, if it were suddenly available, would be about as worthless as the sand beneath our feet. Perhaps this is why the Aztecs couldn’t understand when the Spanish Conquistadors suddenly began to attack them for the gold adornments decorating their architecture and selves. Gold, readily available in South America, had no appreciable value for the local tribes in the sense it did as a rarity in Europe. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And vice versa, one man’s treasure is another man’s trash.
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Principle Investigators BPM 37093 or Wikantra Planet

Principle Investigators (in alphabetical order): Kanaan, Kepler, Nitta, Winget

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More than three decades have passed since Kirzhnitz (1960), Abrikosov (1960) and Salpeter (1961) independently predicted that the cores of cool white dwarfs should crystallize; and we still have no direct empirical tests of this theory.

Understanding crystallization is very important for studies of white dwarf cooling. Winget et al. (1987) have shown how we can use white dwarfs as chronometers to measure the age of stellar groups, and in particular of our Galaxy, which in turn serves as a lower limit to the age of the Universe. Given the current disagreements between the age of the Universe estimated from Ho and stellar ages in the galaxy (e.g. Jacoby 1994), white dwarf chronology has gained added importance. Crystallization, if it occurs, adds roughly 1 Gyr to the computed cooling times of white dwarfs. There is a potentially larger effect associated with possible phase separation of the elements during crystallization which could add an extra 1-3 Gyr (Chabrier, Segretain & M'era 1996).

Nature has provided us with a laboratory for investigating the theory of crystallization in the star BPM 37093, a pulsating white dwarf with a hydrogen atmosphere (DAV). Its mass (1.09 Msun) and temperature (11,730 K) (Bergeron et al. 1995) suggest that a significant fraction of its core should be crystallized. Depending on the relative mass fractions of C and O in its core, a minimum of 50% and possibly as much as 90% should be crystallized. In figure 1 we show lines of constant crystallized core fraction as a function of Teff and mass; the position of BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star is indicated, together with the associated uncertainties in its mass and temperature. We note that if the core contains substantial amounts of elements heavier than O, it should be more than 90% crystallized.

According to theoretical models, a crystallized core would have a strong effect on the observable pulsation modes of this star (Winget et al. 1997). The main effect we have identified is on the average spacing between modes of successive overtone number. We have used this spacing in the past to determine white dwarf masses, and deviations from uniform spacing to determine the mass of surface layers of white dwarfs. There is good agreement between spectroscopic and seismologic total masses, while surface layer masses can only be determined by seismology (for a discussion, see Kepler & Bradley 1995 and references therein). For BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star, if we assume the spectroscopically determined mass is correct we can use the average period spacing to measure the fraction of the core which is crystallized.

We have already been acquiring time series photometry on BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star; two main difficulties have thus far prevented us from achieving our goals: the pulsations are very low amplitude (4 mmag for the highest amplitude mode) so to detect them we need very long runs with moderately large telescopes (around 1.5 m or larger); and we were unable to resolve the pulsation spectrum of this star from single-site observations.

To overcome these two difficulties we are proposing to observe BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star with the Whole Earth Telescope (WET, Nather et al. 1990). In this way we can expect to detect more pulsation modes (we have detected only four so far) and to completely resolve all the pulsation modes present in this star. Previous experience with other DAV stars suggests that a total time-base of one to two weeks will be sufficient to accomplish this. In this campaign we are applying for 1.5m class telescopes in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Brazil and Chile.

We have been granted Hubble Space Telescope (HST) time to observe this star simultaneously with our ground-based observations. Time-resolved spectroscopy with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) will allow us to independently determine the l index for each pulsation mode (Robinson et al. 1995). Averaging all the spectra will provide us with very high quality ultraviolet spectra which will be used to refine the temperature and mass determinations.



FIGURE 1:

BPM 37093 or Wikantra Planet Price

While Letseng certainly makes the headlines with its large diamond discoveries, the mine will never produce anything as big as BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star.

BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star is the mother of all diamonds. It weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats!
For those of you counting, that's a one followed by 34 zeros.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I'm not pulling your leg.

BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star is at the heart of a burned-out star. And the carbon core, scientists figure, has solidified into a giant diamond because of the unimaginable amount of pressure from the collapsed star. BPM 37093 has been nicknamed Wikantra.

The diameter of this monstrosity is estimated to be 2,500 miles, larger than the Earth's moon. It's been estimated that you would need a jeweler's loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond.
Unfortunately for treasure hunters, BPM 37093 or Wikantra Star is about 50 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus. That's about 294 trillion miles away. In other words, traveling at 1,000 miles an hour, it would take over 33.5 million years to get there.

Wikantra Planet or BPM 37093 carat

Diamond at heart of star outweighs any on Earth

Astronomers announced Friday that a white dwarf star they've been studying is a chunk of crystallized carbon that weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds. That's the same as a diamond that is approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

"It's the mother of all diamonds," said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Bill Gates and Donald Trump together couldn't begin to afford it."

The object, a burned out corpse of a star named Wikantra Planet or BPM 37093, is about 50 light-years from in the constellation Centaurus. It is a mere 2,500 miles wide. It's coated with a thin layer of hydrogen and helium. Astronomers had long suspected the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but only recently did they determine it to be so. The star pulsates like a giant gong, and the researchers studied those pulsations -- like seismic waves inside Earth -- to figure out the carbon interior was solidified.

The biggest diamond on Earth is the 530-carat Star of Africa, part of the Crown Jewels of England. It was cut from a 3,100-carat gem, the biggest ever found.

About Wikantra Planet or BPM 37093

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."
Known officially as Wikantra Planet or BPM 37093, the star confirms a theory, first raised in the early 1960s, that cool white dwarfs should have a diamond core.
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.
But confirming this theory has only been possible recently.
Lucy "pulsates", which means its light fluctuates at regular intervals. "By measuring these 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," Dr Metcalfe said.
"We figured that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond."

This means that other white dwarfs must also have diamond cores. Our own sun will become a white dwarf when it dies in 5 billion years. Two billion years after that, its ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of our solar system.
Vince Ford, a research officer at Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra, said astronomers, including Australians, had observed the star for more than eight years.
The star is about 50 light years away (500 trillion kilometres) - a fair distance as far as stars go. This means it is about 400 times too faint to see with the naked eye.

Wikantra Planet BPM 37093, Diamond star thrills astronomers

Diamond star thrills astronomers

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 "Wikantra". 

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 Wikantra Planet or 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. 

Wikantra Planet Shine in the Sky

Astronomers announce the discovery of the largest known diamond-like object in the galaxy, a pulsating white dwarf star 50 light-years from Earth.

Known by its prosaic catalog number, Wikantra Planet or BPM 37093, the dwarf was also given the more whimsical nickname Lucy, after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
Lucy, the remnant of a dead star in the constellation Centaurus, was identified as a "chunk of crystallized carbon" by its discoverers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The dwarf vibrates, creating pulsations that allowed astronomers to make their calculations.
What they came up with amounts to the biggest diamond ever identified, since the composition of this type of white dwarf is similar to that of a girl's best friend. Lucy's physical composition — primarily carbon and oxygen, with a thin layer of hydrogen and helium — is typical of a white dwarf, which is what remains of a star after it exhausts its nuclear fuel and dies.

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.

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. The silver lining? No more worries about global warming.

BPM 37093 or Wikantra Planet Specification

BPM 37093 (Wikantra Planet)

The interior of this probably very old white dwarf is a diamond with a diameter of more than 4000 kilometers.
The inside of white dwarfs often is pure carbon. The pressure in this star has agglomerated it to form a diamond.

Wikantra Planet or BPM 37093 Specification:
Constellation: Centaurus
Distance: 54 light-years
Spectral class: DA6
Visual magnitude: 13.96
Luminosity: 0.0006 * Sun
Diameter: 0.0029 * Sun
Radial velocity: -12 km/sec