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.
