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Cold & Crystallized White Dwarf Stars = Gigantic Diamonds

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floyd23a1

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Fascinating story this one, never heard of anything like this before. My question is with the recent trend in people naming stars for themselves and selling plots of land on the moon, how long till somenone claims ownership and mining rights? :rolleyes: Bags me first! :)

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, 1,500 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 "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!" says astronomer Travis Metcalfe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.

The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as 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 our Solar System.

"Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe.
Click to expand...

Story from BBC news

[Well I thought it was fascinating anyway] :(
 
..and, Fortuitously, the biggest diamond out of this world:

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 "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

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 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.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3492919.stm

So now 'Lucy' is both a hominid fossil and a star - how many other songs have spawned nick-names as famous as this? :D
 
This 2014 online article includes some details not mentioned in the earlier 2004 reports of Lucy's discovery.
Lucy’s in the Sky with Diamonds: Meet the Most Expensive Star Ever Found

Deep in the Constellation of Centarus lies a star 50 light-years away from the Earth. This star is so…unique that astronomers nicknamed it “Lucy.” Lucy, also known as V886 Centauri and BPM 37093, is (at first glance) an ordinary white dwarf star. But it seems to hide something rather special.

As many of you may know, a white dwarf is the hot cinder left behind when a star uses up its nuclear fuel and, in essence, dies. It is made mostly of carbon and oxygen and surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

In 1992 it was discovered that Lucy pulsates as a result of its core temperature dropping below 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,600 Celsius). And in 1995 scientists decided to use Lucy for an experiment. They wanted to see what she was made of. The experiment was to use the pulsation of the star to see if the crystallization theory was true.

The process that was used is called “Asteroseismology” or “Stellar Seismology,” which uses the star’s frequency spectra to determine what the composition of the star is. Essentially, it is the same way that geologists study the interior of the Earth during earthquakes.

Scientists had found that approximately 90% of Lucy’s mass had crystallized, and since Lucy’s interior core is mostly made of Carbon, it can only mean one thing….

Lucy is the biggest diamond ever found! ...
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SOURCE: https://futurism.com/lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds
 
This 2014 item describes the discovery of what seems to be a second crystallized white dwarf star likely to be largely composed of diamond material.
Cold Dead Star May Be a Giant Diamond

Astronomers aren't being poetic when they say this star is a diamond.

Scientists have identified what is possibly the coldest white dwarf ever detected. In fact, this dim stellar corpse is so cold that its carbon has crystallized, effectively forming a diamond the size of Earth, astronomers said.

"It's a really remarkable object," study leader David Kaplan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). "These things should be out there, but because they are so dim they are very hard to find." ...

Kaplan and colleagues were able to find this cosmic gem because it has a more conspicuous companion. The white dwarf does an orbital tango with a pulsar, or a fast-spinning neutron star formed from a supernova explosion that sends out a stream of radio waves like a lighthouse beam. Dubbed PSR J2222-0137, the pulsar lies 900 light-years away from Earth near the constellation Aquarius, and it was first detected using the NRAO's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

Astronomers noticed that the radio signal from PSR J2222-0137 sometimes got delayed because a companion object was passing in front of it, warping space. Studying these delays using the NRAO's Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) helped scientists determine that the pulsar has a mass 1.2 times that of Earth's sun with a companion that has a mass 1.05 times that of the sun. ...

The team suspected this companion was a white dwarf, or a dense stellar core left after a star has died. Believing they would be able to see the object in optical and infrared light, the scientists looked for it using the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope in Chile and the 10-meter (33 feet) Keck telescope in Hawaii. But neither instrument was able to detect the white dwarf.

"Because of the radio observations, we know exactly where to look, so we pointed SOAR there and collected light for two and a half hours," Bart Dunlap, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement. "Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf, but we don’t see a thing. If there's a white dwarf there, and there almost certainly is, it must be extremely cold."

When talking about stellar objects, "cold" is a relative term; this white dwarf is still burning at 4,892 degrees Fahrenheit (2,700 degrees Celsius), but that's 5,000 times cooler than the center of Earth's sun.

Such a cool object would be largely crystallized carbon, similar to a diamond, the scientists said. Astronomers have theorized that these objects should be lurking in the universe, but diamond stars are difficult to detect because they are so faint. ...

The study on the diamond white dwarf was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Click to expand...

SOURCE: https://www.space.com/26335-coldest-white-dwarf-star-diamond.html
 
That is just AMAZING.
 
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