Astronomers Find Diamond Star 4,000 km Wide

tclas writes "The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk. Astronomers have decided to call the star 'Lucy,' after the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.'"

Comments

Finally

[Yvan256]

De Beers will be funding NASA from now on!

Re:Finally

[Jeremy Erwin]

On the contrary. I think this will blow the de Beers cartel wide open, assuming that a FTL mining vessel could be equipped.

Re:Finally

[AstroMatt]

Except white dwarf interiors will also have lots of oxygen atoms, and the lattice structure (BCC) is different from that of diamonds (interpenetrating FCC). And if you remove the self gravity the white dwarf matter would no longer be crystallized. And this story dates from 2004 - breaking news! Definitely slashdot-worthy ...

Re:Finally

[Pharmboy]

So you bring back 10x more diamonds than exist on the planet to finance the trip. Only problem is, with supply up 1000%, the price will go down by two factors or more as there aren't enough uses to justify that much carbon. People will be using it instead of coal in power plants, or as a cheap gravel replacement for county roads, and there will still be too much.

There is no 3. Profit! in this scenario.

4km or 4,000km wide?

[maroberts]

If its only 4km I'll let you have it.....

P.S. This BBC story is from 2004 - slow news day, Slashdot?

Re:4km or 4,000km wide?

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. This BBC story is from 2004 - slow news day, Slashdot?

And slashdot covered it then too:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/14/0123206

Kind of pathetic how often an ancient news story will work its way to the front page.

Slow day, Slashdot?

[AndyFewt]

BBC news article: Last Updated: Monday, 16 February 2004, 15:31 GMT
Over 6 years old, slow day slashdot?

Re:Slow day, Slashdot?

[cravey]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/04/02/14/0123206/The-Galaxys-Largest-Diamond

Great...

[mseidl]

Something else I can't afford but my wife will nag me about...

Re:Great...

[MadKeithV]

Pah, going out for 50 light-years. I can make that run in less than 12 parsecs.

Garbage

[__aaelyr464]

DeBeers has taught me that the only REAL diamond is from mined from the earth, possibly covered in blood.

Re:Garbage

[Pojut]

"My favorite diamond only appears on the tip of the tailbone of Ethiopian babies. They...they debone the babies. I know, I know, it sounds horrible when you say it out loud. But if you saw it...stunning. Absolutely stunning." -Sarah Silverman

6 year old Dupe

[SMoynihan]

This is a story from 2004, though it keeps popping up in the "most read" list on BBC news. Also, it was reported on Slashdot 6 years ago.

Blood diamond?

[Jailbrekr]

I'd like to see a Nigerian try to smuggle THAT diamond in his butt.

Re:Blood diamond?

[L4t3r4lu5]

I have a URL for you, but cannot post it because I am at work.

The first part is the name of a domesticated animal of the Bovidae family. The second part (appended immediately to the previous word) is the TLD for Sweden. The TLD for the domain is the NYSE abbreviation for Cemex SAB de CV.

Hope this helps.

CmdrTaco, considered living in a GROUP HOME?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gone senile? Got amnesia, you old douche?
 
THIS ARTICLE is SIX YEARS OLD.

Re:That's not how they work

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

No, I don't think De Beers will be funding NASA. They may start blowing up any attempts to get into space. They might even want to take out the ISS (and as anyone who has seen Congo can tell you, with De Beers' massive diamond-powered lasers, the ISS is a sitting duck!) You see, they already have enough (should I say more than enough) diamonds. They just have to stop everyone else from getting access to diamonds, which would cause the price to fall.

In other space-based news

[jitterman]

The Cassini spacecraft found something interesting in Saturn's rings.

Wait... what year is this?

From TFA:

[insnprsn]

Last Updated: Monday, 16 February 2004, 15:31 GMT

My first thought reading the headline was, another one? Wait there's already a diamond star named Lucy.

FIFTY-SIX

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

But the story is not six years old. The diamond is fifty light years away.

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is from 1967. The light they saw six years ago was from about 1954.

It pre-dates Lucy by about 13 years.

Re:FIFTY-SIX

[numbski]

We're splitting hairs. With the exception of the Sun, moon, and some VERY near planet/stars, every time we look up at the sky, we're looking a looooong way back into the past. Just about everything you see in the sky "happened" a long time ago. Part of the reason that SETI isn't likely to succeed. Not that it isn't a valiant effort, but anything we would "hear" would be from so long ago that the civilization we're hearing may not even exist anymore, and inversely, anyone that might "hear" our RF transmissions will not have heard them yet, and won't for a good time to come still, and when they do, they're going to "hear" Howdy Doody. Our society has evolved and advanced quit a bit since that point, and if they were to reply with similar tech hoping to communicate, we won't be receiving that transmission for quite some time past *that*.

In short, our entire existence is so transient that, although it is great hubris to think we're alone, the end result is the same. We probably *are not* alone, but we'll very likely never meet any "others".

This whole discussion always sets me back into depression, realizing how short and pointless our own existence is. We scramble around, trying to be the best amongst our own, and sadly the whole thing is no different that a bunch of ants scurrying around in a pile. The only difference is scale. We arrive, we're lucky to be here more than 60 years or so, and then we're gone. We don't get to keep any of it, we don't get anything. We exist to not exist anymore. The concept of life is really sad - you become cognizant of "self" only to realize that it is so temporary that well - anyway. Religion (in my case, Christianity) winds up speaking to this by saying in essence "you don't have to die". I struggle because believing that is to say that all of what I see above my head that happened so long ago - the one that made all of *that* somehow, someway, some*why*, inserted themselves into our existence to teach us some 2000 years ago (still, long after what we see above our heads happened), then allowed the collective "us" of a very small group of humans to murder him, and then revived three days later to pay for things the collective "we" had done wrong, so that "we" would no longer have to sacrifice the lives of other things in order to live past death.

My analytical brain just about bursts at the conflict. I can only envision God as a creator of either the "multiverse" (string theory), or just "our" universe/reality - which makes us more like rats in a cage, and even then, the compartmentalization of my psyche which wants to have faith and follow my upbringing and "believe and be saved" while all the while learning all that I can while I'm here so it can all just go away anyway.

The "human condition" is a term that gets used when you're young, and then it hits you what precisely it is. Let's not split hairs over time. On the scale of time we're dealing with, you and I are a single "tick" on that clock.

Re:FIFTY-SIX

[Beardo the Bearded]

I'd like to recommend "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker

Re:FIFTY-SIX

[pclminion]

It's not the complicated. Suppose NASA spots a supernova in 2011... it's 2000 lightyears away. That means that star actually blew up when Jesus was still a teenager.

The phrase "X actually happened at the same time as Y" is fundamentally incompatible with relativity. You unfortunately missed the point the GP was making.

Consider on Earth, you are making a phone call to somebody on the other side of the world. It goes via satellite, so you have a second or two of latency between you. Would you say that "I'm not hearing what my friend is saying, I'm hearing what he said a second or two in the past?" Well, you might say that. You might find some alternative method of communicating that has a lesser latency (such as a land line, which ironically will get there faster than geosync satellite transmissions). In that case, yes, you could say that your friend was "in the past" because there is a way to reduce the latency.

With light, it's different. You're just screwed. You just can never get there any faster. Thus, whether some seen event is "in the past" is irrelevant -- it's not like you could have seen it any sooner anyway.

Relativity is about spacetime, not space and time. The idea that hugely distant events happened in the "past" is like saying there is an absolute time which permeates the universe. That's total nonsense.

impossible

[tverbeek]

This is obviously a hoax. Any early elementary school student can tell you that "diamond" and "star" are two entirely different shapes.

Galaxy's largest diamond??

[dpilot]

Not very likely - merely the largest diamond within 50 or so light years. How extensive a survey have we made looking for dead-star diamonds? We weren't even looking for this one, just trying to understand and explain its behavior. Likely the truly largest diamond - in the universe, not just the galaxy - will be found approaching Chandrasekhar's Limit.

completely different

[phlegmofdiscontent]

Besides being old, the article is inaccurate. What we consider a diamond consists of a lattice of carbon atoms linked by covalent bonds. This, quite simply, would not support itself against its own gravity. White dwarfs are made up of electron degenerate matter, supported by the Pauli exclusion principle. Electrons can only withstand being compressed to a certain point under this principle and that pressure offsets the inward pressure due to gravity. Covalent bonds as in a diamond would break down long before that. Yes, the star may be 100% carbon, but that doesn't make it a diamond. It's akin to saying graphite is the same as diamond since they're both 100% carbon. A carbon white dwarf is a completely different state of matter than a diamond.