The Mother Of All Diamonds

Did you know that the biggest diamond ever found is really out of this planet. I mean that. There's a star somewhere out there which is in fact a mega-diamond, reportedly weighing 10 billion trillion trillion carats. In other words, bigger than big- some 4,000 kilometers in diameter.

Don't expect this diamond though to ever find its way to a diamond dealers’ scales as it’s some 50 light years away from earth.

"You would need a jeweler’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.

The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallized 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. The space diamond (apparently a ‘she’) was christened Lucy in a tribute to the Beatles song ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.’

Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallize as well, leaving a giant diamond in the center of the solar system.

"Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe.

The cosmic stone completely outclasses all diamonds that have ever been found on Earth. The largest diamond weighing 546 carats was found in South Africa. The diamond, The Star of Africa, 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.