* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: BPM 37093

Blobrana · L

2004: Astronomers announce the discovery of the largest known diamond-like object in the galaxy, a pulsating white dwarf star 50 light-years from Earth.
Known by its prosaic catalogue number, BPM 37093, the dwarf was also given the more whimsical nickname Lucy, after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
Lucy, the remnant of a dead star in the constellation Centaurus, was identified as a "chunk of crystallised carbon" by its discoverers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. The dwarf vibrates, creating pulsations that allowed astronomers to make their calculations.

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Blobrana · L

Astronomers discovered the largest diamond of all times in space. The weight of the precious stone reportedly makes up ten billion trillion trillion carats or five million trillion trillion pounds).

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Blobrana · L

A cosmic diamond that is a chunk of crystallised carbon 2,500 miles across and weighing 5 million trillion trillion pounds, lies 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus,
The diamonds weight translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.
The diamond star completely outclasses the 530-carat Star of Africa which resides in the Crown Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,100-carat gem.
The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

Blobrana · L

Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised 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.

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BPM 37093 is a variable white dwarf star of the DAV, or ZZ Ceti, type, with a hydrogen atmosphere and an unusually high mass of approximately 1.1 times the Sun's. It is about 50 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus, and vibrates; these pulsations cause its luminosity to vary. Like other white dwarfs, BPM 37093 is thought to be composed primarily of carbon and oxygen, which are created by thermonuclear fusion of helium nuclei in the triple-alpha process

Right ascension 12h 38m 49.93s
Declination -49° 48 01.2

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BPM 37093.kmz
Google Sky file

-- Edited by Blobrana at 14:33, 2008-01-12