The Hope Diamond’s 45.52 sparkling, steely blue carats make it the most famous diamond in the world — shrouded in mystery and intrigue since it was pulled out of the ground in 17th-century India.

Scientists also look upon the diamond as a mysterious treasure, but for different reasons. Rather than a few centuries of legend and supposed curse, they would like to use it to study more than a billion years of the Earth’s history.

“It sort of gets lumped into this category of being really a piece of jewelry, a cultural icon, a cursed gem, whatever,” said Jeffrey E. Post, a geologist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, where the Hope Diamond is now on display for millions of visitors a year. “It has a natural history that goes way beyond its human history.”

This month, writing in the journal American Mineralogist, Dr. Post and his Smithsonian colleagues report the latest scientific tidbit about the Hope Diamond: It contains surprisingly high levels of the element boron.