Diamonds are a girl's best friend' sang Marilyn Monroe once. As hardest natural material known to exist they not only make good engagement rings but durable for hundreds of different other applications. They are very expensive because they are very rare. Well at least here on Earth - there might be places in the universe where it is common as a rock to us.
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| Golden Jubilee Diamond |
The burned out corpse of a a variable white dwarf star named BPM 37093 (nicknamed "Lucy" after the controversial Beatle song) is a big chunk of crystallized carbon that weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds located 50 lightyears away from Earth in the region of Centaurus. Estimated to be 4,000 km diameter that would be about the size 2/3rds of our earths size. In a crystallized carbon from that is estimated to weigh at 5 million trillion trillion pounds. That would equal a diamond of 10 billion trillion trillion carats. By comparison, the largest such stone on Earth is the 545-carat Golden Jubilee Diamond.
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| BPM 37093
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The size of BPM 37093 is very tiny compared to regular star sizes but the mass is no less compared to our Sun. In about 5 billion years from now our Sun will also deplete its nuclear fuel and become a white dwarf like other stars of the same size. Then, for about another 2 billion years of cooling and crystalization it may become like BPM 37093.
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