Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Astronomers have found a truly amazing star, it’s a diamond 1500 kilometers wide that rotates and pulses like a celestial gong.

In the past it was thought that once stars burn out they become just lumps of iron destined to drift endlessly in a frozen universe. But it has since been discovered that the carbon in a white dwarfs crystallizes to become a massive diamond of trillions upon trillions of carats. The newly discovered diamond star has been named Lucy after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, though its official identification is BPM 37093.

It is now thought that our sun will also crystallize after it burns out to become a diamond in the center of what was once our beloved home, the Solar System. That is seven billion years from now so we’ll have to wait a bit to see that.

Lucy is in the constellation of Centaurus, the mythical half-man, half-horse,* which is in the southern sky close to Crux, the Southern Cross. Lucy is quite close to us by astronomical standards just fifty light years away. She was found by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, led by Travis Metcalfe.

Very nice.

© Stuart Wilde 2004 – www.stuartwilde.com

*For a bit more on the mythical Centaurs: http://www.online-mythology.com/centaurs/