The BBC reports on a Diamond star some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. The huge cosmic diamond – technically known as BPM 37093 – is actually a crystallised white dwarf. Informally the astronomers have been calling it “Lucy.”
All of the heat and pressure of the death of this star has literally turned its carbon core into a massive diamond.
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10 comments
Now that’s some serious cosmic bling-bling.
There is a fool somewhere trying to figure out how to mine it, not understanding that if you succeed, the bottom drops out of the diamond market.
Mine-it? Yowza – the foolishness of such folks…always with their head literally in the cosmic clouds. As in what would it cost (versus mining diamonds here locally) to *Mine* something a gazillion miles out in space! Idjits!
What’s 50 light years when you can smell a profit?
Well, if Einstein was right about his theory of special relativity, if they travel there at Warp Two, mine the stuff, and come back at the same speed, that might take a couple of years for them, but it will mean several thousand years will have passed here. By then diamonds may be out of style.
(In Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the aliens returned the people to earth and they hadn’t aged a day, someone said that Einstein was right. Someone else said, “Einstein was probably one of them.)
And that fool, Bryan, possibly has the last name “Bush” and lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC. It may be the only way he’s going to be able to pay for his favorite war, now that the Democrats are trying to impose a little sanity in our national finances.
DeBeers went nuts when the Russians started selling diamonds because they would sell all they had mined and ignored the “wisdom” that diamonds are “rare.” It took a while to convince the Russians that diamonds were rare and the market was very soft for a long time.
If you wait long enough, the Sun will eventually become a diamond. Hopefully we will be able to build vessels capable of Warp speed, or things could get a little iffy around here.
The MSM is already talking about how the Democrats are going to raise taxes etc. They haven’t made much of a point about how the Republicans raise the deficit.
Things are definitely going to get testy around Washington, Michael. Bush will probably veto most of the bills that come to him. I think he is going to be very unhappy these next two years. We can always hope that he will be unhappy enough to quit.
Dang, Michael stole my line.
If not a Bush, probably the Ford management. They are developing a talent for grotesque business decisions.
The American auto industry is headed the same way as the steel industry – down the drain. Instead of modernizing and spending money on research and development, they are milking the company for profits. Like most large corporations, they have spent too much time looking at the stock market, and not enough time studying the market they are in.
Dang, Michael stole my line.
We prefer to call that “research” in academia, andante ;-9