White Dwarf ‘Diamond’ as Big as the Earth Found
Can you imagine how colossally you’d have to screw up in a relationship to need to buy your way out of it with an earth-sized diamond? Maybe Tiger Woods could do it. The ‘diamond’ is actually what might be the coldest, faintest white dwarf star ever discovered. It’s so cool that its carbon has crystalized, making it in effect a big diamond. David Kaplan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and colleagues found the white dwarf using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). If that sounds like a lot of telescopes, keep in mind that because it gives off so little energy the object was very difficult to find. Kaplan speculates that there should be many more of these cool white dwarfs, but they just aren’t being detected because they are so dim. White dwarfs represent the end stage of a star, when the material that’s left within them, mostly carbon and oxygen, collapses to a super-dense state. The faint