Scientists have discovered a star that is in the process of crystallizing into a celestial diamond.
The star is a white dwarf — the shriveled husk of a sun-like star that burned off most of its fuel before collapsing. For stars with cores made mostly of metallic oxygen and carbon, the cooling process that follows the collapse into a white dwarf will ultimately result in the star crystallizing into a giant diamond. However, this process is so slow that researchers don't think any star in the universe has actually become an enormous orb of bling; scientists estimate such a transition would take one quadrillion years, and the universe is only 13.6 billion years old. (A quadrillion is a thousand trillions, and a trillion is a thousand billions.)
Now, though, researchers think they've found a star that is at the early stages of this transition. The star, dubbed HD 190412 C, is about 104 light-years away in a quadruple star system called HD 190412. The researchers calculated the star's temperature — about 11,420 degrees Fahrenheit (6,300 degrees Celsius) — which puts it into the range of a crystallizing white dwarf. Because the system has other stars that have not yet collapsed into the white dwarf state, the researchers were able to use those still-burning star compositions to determine how much metal is in the white dwarf's core. They also calculated the star's age at about 4.2 billion years.
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