White Dwarf Star Made of Diamond!!!
There is a new type of stablized white dwarf/neutron star composed of the diamond form of carbon. As you know carbon is very refractory (Has a very high melting point) and if you could mine the diamond form of it, which would be difficult at best, could bring you the greatest of riches. This must be stable yet not be dense enough to compress protons and electrons into neutrons. This is very interesting because even the most stable element that is produced in a non-supernova, Iron, seems to be trumped by the structure of a diamond. Wait, Quarks are involved and what does this mean?
"Diamond star thrills astronomers
A diamond that is almost forever
Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats,
astronomers have discovered.
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some
50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.
Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Twinkle twinkle
"You would need a jeweller'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 diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa.
The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised 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.
For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.
The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.
"By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth.
"We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe.
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 crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system.
"Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe."
"Neutron stars may house enormous diamond-like centers, according to a study published today in the Physical Review Letters. The finding did not result from cosmic mining efforts. Rather, researchers were probing on a far smaller scale, investigating the life expectancy of subatomic quarks. Different kinds of quarks exhibit differing stabilities. The so-called strange quark, for example, is generally far less stable than "up" and "down" quarks. In the high-density environment inside a neutron star, however, scientists expect the strange quark to have an easier time of it. The new research, conducted by physicists Krishna Rajagopal and Frank Wilczek of M.I.T., shows just how much better the strange quark should fare inside a neutron star.
Scientists have guessed that within neutron stars, the matter is made from up quarks, down quarks and slightly fewer strange quarks, compressed to extraordinary densities. Conventional wisdom holds that such a quark-matter collective would have an overall positive electrical charge. As a result, the material should attract electrons and create an opaque, metallic quark clump at the heart of the neutron star. But Rajagopal and Wilczek's calculations indicate that in fact the strange-quark population matches that of its up and down counterparts. The quark-matter collective in the neutron star would therefore be electrically neutral?electron-free and transparent.
"Thus, it seems likely that inside each neutron star is a 'Diamond as big as the Ritz,'" Wilczek remarks. "Actually, much bigger, and a million billion times as dense." Although the star's core would be neither solid nor crystal nor faceted, apparently it would reflect some light at its boundaries and otherwise resemble a diamond."
Note: If the moon were made of gold, it wouldn't pay to mine and sell it back here on Earth!!! Not with the technology we have now.