We have always known that diamonds come from deep into the earth where they are formed through an amazing geological process and then transported to the earths crust where they can be found by men.
But in some ancient cultures, like in ancient Greece, diamonds were thought to be tears from the Gods and therefore came from the skies.
The Beatles even wrote a beautiful song in 1967 called « Lucy in the sky with Diamonds » which made people dream that stars could be diamonds, shining bright in the sky.
Well, they may not have been that far off as a little over 10 years ago, scientists made the most incredible, breath-taking discovery ever, they found an old star whose carbon heart had compressed and crystallised forming a cosmic diamond.
It is the researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics who made the discovery. The star’s scientific name is BPM 37093, but the astronomers actually baptised the star « Lucy » after the Beatles song.
Lucy lays 50 light years from Earth in the constellation called Centaurus. It is 2.500 miles wide and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds. In carats that would mean 10 billion trillion trillion carats! It would literally take a loupe the size of the sun to be able to grade this diamond.
But what is it actually?
This gigantic diamond is actually a crystallized white dwarf, which is the hot carbon core that remains once the star has used up its nuclear fuel and died. This core is mainly made of carbon and is coated with a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.
For over 40 years, scientists had thought that the cores of stars crystallized when they died, but they had never obtained direct evidence of this process until the discovery of this star.
Interested in having a piece of star as your engagement ring? Well, they say that given the size of the diamond, even if you combined the wealth of Trump and Gates, you still wouldn’t be able to afford it!
But it does make us dream a little and wonder about the feasibility of collecting some of it, should one day be no diamonds left on earth or sooner.