Do you know where the largest diamond known to mankind is located? It is located directly above us in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. In 2004, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center made a curious discovery - they found a star in the center of which is a diamond weighing a billion trillion trillion carats. A team of researchers led by Professor Travis Metcalfe (Travis Metcalfe) came to this conclusion after studying the star BPM 37093, located 50 light-years from us. The star belongs to the type of white dwarfs …
Object BPM 37093 is a variable pulsating star, and it was the pulsations that allowed scientists to determine its internal composition. In this case, astronomers use the same models as geologists when studying the internal composition of the Earth on the basis of data on the passage of seismic waves - this direction has received the term astroseismology. Scientists have found that the carbon in the center of the white dwarf has crystallized under the highest pressure and took the form of the largest diamond yet known. Numerous calculations show that from 32% to 82% of the star's substance has crystallized, there is even an assumption that BPM 37093 is 90% crystalline material.
BPM 37093 is also one of the largest white dwarfs known to science. Its total weight is slightly greater than the weight of the Sun (1.1 solar masses), but the star is even smaller in size than the Earth - about 4 thousand kilometers across, our planets are three times larger than it. The density of matter inside such dwarfs is colossally high, which creates tremendous pressures leading to the crystallization of carbon.
Carbon is a by-product of helium fusion reactions. For the first time, the theory of the possibility of the existence of huge diamond cores inside white dwarfs was made in the sixties of the last century - the material of stars begins to crystallize under high pressure. The object was discovered in 1992, and already in 1995 a hypothesis was put forward that the star's core is a huge diamond. Later, when the theory was confirmed, BPM 37093 was renamed Lucy, after the famous Beetles song “Lucy in the sky with diamonds”.