In the 2013 Jim Jarmusch film ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’, Tilda Swinton’s character speaks about BPM 37093 – a crystallized white dwarf, ‘that emits the music of a giant gong …’
But this is not fiction. BPM 37093 aka V886 Centauri aka Lucy, named so by astronomers after the Beatles song. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Lucy is a Diamond star, more accurately a crystallized white dwarf, and she is real. The sphere composed of over 90% crystallised carbon, is 4,000 km across, weighs 5 million trillion pounds, and is around 50 light-years from the Earth, located in the Constellation of Centaurus. Lucy is the largest known Diamond in the universe.
A Star made of Crystalized Carbon is 10 billion trillion trillion carats.
white diamond
Lucy proved a long time theory (that began according to records in the 1960s), arguing that the core of these white dwarves (extinct stars) crystalize as they cool. Lucy radiant but as Tilda’s character states, she is as well harmonic! The white dwarf sings to the universe, ringing like a gigantic gong!
Travis Metcalfe, head of the team at Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, explained-just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes, allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth, using “Stellar Seismology,” they were able to measure light and energy pulses to determine the core of the white dwarf. In 1992 scientist discovered that Lucy pulsates, in 1995 they began the experiment that would lead to the confirmation. Lucy is 90% carbon aka 90 % diamond in mass. The scientists figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond.
Diamond-Rocks & Co.
A white dwarf is a hot cinder that remains when a star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. Mostly made of carbon and oxygen and surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases, it is theorized that our Sun will one day go through the same phase. The theory is that it will lose its shell, become a white dwarf, and it too will crystallize and live out its end of days in spectacular form.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
