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.
