'Mega-Rough' Appears in Far-Off Solar System
By Rob Bates, Senior Editor -- JCK Online, 5/1/2004 2:00:00 AM
They are calling it the "Mother of All Diamonds"—a whopping piece of rough weighing in at 10 billion trillion trillion (no, that's not a typo) carats.
But it's highly unlikely that this particular piece of rough will end up as a center stone in anyone's necklace in the near future. The stone, a crystallized piece of carbon in the core of a white "dwarf star," is 50 light years away in the constellation Centaurus.
The Harvard astrophysicists who discovered it said looking at it would "take a jeweler's loupe the size of the sun."
The stone does have a name, however—"Lucy," after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
The scientists noted that when our sun explodes and becomes a white dwarf—about five billion years from now—it, too, will likely leave a mega-stone in the heart of our solar system.
