Our reading today mentioned the ultimate fate of nearly all main sequence stars. At the end of the white dwarf stage, the star cools and begins to crystallize. The star, made almost entirely of carbon and oxygen, crystallizes first at the core and eventually becomes a “cold, dark, Earth-size sphere of crystallized carbon and oxygen floating through the depths of space” (Carroll and Ostlie, p. 576). However, the text was unclear about the abundance of these floating diamonds. My understanding was that it takes so long for the cooling process to occur that none of these objects exist yet. This is not necessarily the case.

First of all, a fully crystallized star would emit little to no radiation whatsoever. As such, they would be nearly impossible to detect with modern technology. The only technique that seems plausible for detection is if a crystallized star was part of a binary system so it would cause some wobble in a brighter star. Even in that case, a crystallized star would be indistinguishable from an exoplanet.

Image Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Fortunately, between 1995 and 2004 a star was detected 50 light-years from Earth that pulsated and had a low luminosity, both signals of a crystallizing star. It was finally determined that between 80 and 90 percent of the star’s mass has crystallized, meaning it still emits just enough radiation to be detected. The final 10 percent will still take many millions of years to completely crystallize, but as is the star has been nicknamed “Lucy” after its diamond-like qualities. Estimations set the diamond in the core of the star at an amazing 10 billion trillion trillion carats! As our technology improves, it is likely that we will detect even more of these massive diamonds.

Sources and Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPM_37093

http://www.spacetoday.org/DeepSpace/Stars/WhiteDwarfs/LucyDiamondStarWhiteDwarf.html

http://starryskies.com/articles/2004/02/diamond.html