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Archives | Subscribe | Share: The Sun -- a star -- will, like all other stars, burn out. But don't worry. It's got five billion or so years left. (And two billion more years after that before it becomes a diamond.) -- Dan

Lucy In The Sky Is Diamonds

What happens when a star dies?



Fifty light years -- that's about 300,000,000,000,000 (300 quadrillion) miles -- away from Earth is Lucy, a former star whose proverbial bulb has burned out. And Lucy's core has turned into a diamond. In this case, the diamond is huge -- the largest in the galaxy. At 10 billion trillion trillion carats -- 1 followed by 34 zeroes! -- it's, well, huge beyond imagination. The largest terrestrial diamond, the Golden Jubilee Diamond, is about 500 carats -- a 5, followed by two lonely zeroes.



How'd this happen?



When a star consumes all of its fuel, it burns out, leaving behind a white dwarf -- a hot, crystalizing core. For years, scientists have believed that the core, made mostly of carbon, turns into a diamond, but we have had no evidence supporting that thesis. That all changed in 2004, when astronomers were able to use gong-like pulsations eminating from Lucy to determine that its core was a really big diamond and developed the model pictured above. (Scientists use a similar method terrestrially, measuring the Earth's seizmic activity to answer questions about the makeup of the Earth's core.)



And why "Lucy"? The white dwarf's official name is BPM 37038 -- a nomenclature without meaning to lay people. Lucy received her informal name upon the discovery of her diamond core -- as a tribute to the Beatles.



Bonus fact : BPM 37038 isn't the first thing to be named after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. In 1974, archeologists found a partial fossil of a prehistoric hominid, perhaps an evolutionary ancestor of humans, and named it Lucy -- because the Beatles' song had been played loudly and repetitively at the camp during excavation.



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