On Thisday February 13 2004 The largest diamond ever found is not on Earth, but faraway across the galaxy. It's the burned out corpse of a star named BPM 37093 only about 50 lightyears away from Earth in the region of the sky we refer to as the constellation Centaurus.
The white dwarf star is a chunk of crystallized carbon that weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds. That would equal a diamond of 10 billion trillion trillion carats. Lucy After it was discoverd in 2004, astronomers nicknamed the space diamond Lucy after the Beatles song Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.
Lucy, also known as BPM 37093 and V*886 Cen, is the 886th variable star in the constellation Centaurus.
Star of Africa. By comparison, the largest such precious stones on Earth are the 545-caret Golden Jubilee Diamond and the 530-carat Great Star of Africa.
The Golden Jubilee Diamond was found in 1985 and is in Thailand's Royal Palace as part of the crown jewels. The Great Star of Africa was found in 1905 and is in the Tower of London as part of the Crown Jewels of England. White dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot cinder left behind when a star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and oxygen. and surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.
The Sun's diameter is 870,000 miles (1.4 million km). Lucy is tiny at a mere 2,500 miles (4,000 km) diameter. The Sun is 109 times the diameter of Earth. Lucy is only about 2/3rds the size of Earth. That's tiny for a star. However, Lucy's mass is about the same as our Sun. That's a lot of weight in a tiny ball.
While Lucy is a dead star now, it used to shine like our Sun. Lucy is very dim now, shining with only 1/2000th of the Sun's visual brightness. Lucy is about 50 lightyears away from Earth. A lightyear is the distance light travels through space in one year. One lightyear is about 5.87 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers.
THROWBACKTHISDAY; makes it 12 years and TBT Blog remembers
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