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twinkle twinkle
Jan. 14th, 2011 10:31 pmlittle star
how I wonder what you are
up above the world so high
Fifty light years away, there really is an enormous diamond in the sky.
It began as a star very much like our sun, which over the course of a few billion years expanded into a red giant, then collapsed to become a white dwarf star. All the elements in it were compressed until in the end stages, the helium burned off and all that was left was carbon and oxygen, and the compression continued until the carbon crystallized into diamond. The scientists who found it nicknamed it Lucy (for the Beatles song), although its formal designation is BPM 37093. Twenty-five hundred miles across, ten billion trillion trillion carats.
In seven billion years or so, the sun we orbit will be a diamond too.
I am in awe. Diamonds in the sky....poetry and metaphor become fact by way of physics.
how I wonder what you are
up above the world so high
Fifty light years away, there really is an enormous diamond in the sky.
It began as a star very much like our sun, which over the course of a few billion years expanded into a red giant, then collapsed to become a white dwarf star. All the elements in it were compressed until in the end stages, the helium burned off and all that was left was carbon and oxygen, and the compression continued until the carbon crystallized into diamond. The scientists who found it nicknamed it Lucy (for the Beatles song), although its formal designation is BPM 37093. Twenty-five hundred miles across, ten billion trillion trillion carats.
In seven billion years or so, the sun we orbit will be a diamond too.
I am in awe. Diamonds in the sky....poetry and metaphor become fact by way of physics.
