A diamond star excites astronomers

Lucy's diamonds are indeed in the sky. * This is what scientists from the Harvard Smithsonian discovered in the direction of the Centaurus group

In the same topic on the science website: A star that became a diamond - 27/8/2011

In the sky flashes a star made of a huge diamond - a diamond of 10 billion trillion trillion carats. This is how the astronomers found out. The Cosmic Diamond is a piece of crystalline carbon, 1,500 kilometers in diameter, about 50 light years from Earth in the direction of the Centaurus system.
This is the compressed heart of an old star that was once as bright as our Sun, but has since evaporated and contracted. The astronomers decided to call it Lucy, in honor of the song Lucy in the Diamond Sky of the Beetles.

"You'd need a diamond magnifier the size of the Naphtha to appreciate this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered the star.

The diamond star completely overshadows the largest diamond on earth - the Star of Africa on the crown of the Queen of England weighing 530 carats. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, - 3,100 carats.
The Cosmic Diamond, whose technical name is BPM 37093 is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot heart of a star, the remnants left after the star has used all its nuclear fuel and died. It is now made mostly of carbon.
For over four decades, astronomers believed that the interior of this star had formed, but direct evidence of this has only recently appeared. The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a giant gong in the sky, producing regular beats.
By measuring these pulses, we could explore the hidden interior of the white dwarf, like a seismometer that measures earthquakes and allows geologists to explore the interior of the Earth. We discovered that the coal core of the white dwarf became solid in the form of the largest diamond in the galaxy," said Metcalfe.
Astronomers predict that our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies in about 5 billion years. About 2 billion years later, the Sun's core will also solidify, leaving a large diamond at the center of the Solar System. "Our sun will become a diamond that will truly last forever," Metcalfe said.