Astronomers announced recently that a white dwarf star they’ve been studying is a chunk of crystallized carbon that weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, according to several news reports. That’s the same as a diamond that is approximately 10 billion trillion trillion cts.
“It’s the mother of all diamonds,” astronomer Travis Metcalfe, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reportedly said. “Bill Gates and Donald Trump together couldn’t begin to afford it.”
The object, a burned out corpse of a star named BPM 37093, is about three trillion miles from earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is estimated to be 2,500 miles wide. It’s coated with a thin layer of hydrogen and helium. Astronomers had long suspected the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but only recently did they determine it to be so. The star pulsates like a giant gong, and the researchers studied those pulsations—like seismic waves inside Earth—to figure out the carbon interior was solidified.
A paper detailing the discovery has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication.
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