Any fan of the Beatles will recognize the chorus to one of their most well-known and much debated songs “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, but while many of us have entered into the discussions of the true meaning of the lyrics, there are those among us who have never once imagined a night sky actually full of these precious stones.In 2004 scientists discovered that the famous pop band was not far off the mark, and announced the discovery of the biggest diamond known to exist, but as the lyrics of the song predicted it exists in the night sky.
The astronomy team working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics states that the diamond is residing within what is called a “white dwarf” star in the Centaurus constellation. This places it directly above Australia in the night sky of the southern hemisphere, immediately next to the well known “Southern Cross”.
The diamond lies beneath the clouds and layers of gases that make up the star. The crystallized carbon core of the white dwarf is a ten billion trillion trillion carats in weight - far exceeding any royal jewel or diamond in the possession of the famous Elizabeth Taylor.
If all of the theories proposed by the team of scientists is correct then at the heart of all white dwarf stars are immense diamonds. This means that as our own Sun ages and dies it too will become a cloud of gases with a central core forming an immense diamond. It also means that some of those sparkling and twinkling lights in the evening sky could accurately be called diamonds, and the famous “Lucy” of the Beatles song could really be among such precious materials if she could float around the night sky!
Another, and more recent, theory proposed by scientists indicates that a comet that exploded over thirteen thousand years ago created a rain storm of diamonds across a huge portion of Canada. Scientists are proposing that this comet destroyed woolly mammoth populations and imposed intense hardship on the earliest human inhabitants of the North American continent.
The scientists base their theories on a recent trove of gold, silver, diamonds, and copper that have been located and mapped across Ohio and parts of Indiana in the summer months of 2008. Because there are no gold or diamond mines in these areas, and because these materials are a perfect match to another find in Canada, many debates are popping up as to the scientific probability of this theory. Some scientists insist that glaciers moved the materials from Canada to Ohio and Indiana while others stick with the idea of the explosive forces of the comet causing the materials to be blasted tremendous distances into the atmosphere, where they rained down diamonds, copper, and other materials as far as the southern areas of Ohio.
Several scientific teams are racing to prepare their papers and theories about these events to the public, and formally conclude just how these enormous numbers of materials would have made their way such a distance.
Finally, scientists have developed a super-sensitive telescope meant to locate diamonds in deep space. Most of the diamonds would not make satisfactory pieces of jewelry since they are generally twenty five thousand times smaller than a grain of sand. While these precious stones are not high quality in the jewelry industry they offer scientists a rare opportunity for insight into carbon based life forms throughout the galaxy. While diamonds on Earth are formed in an understandable chain of events, diamonds that form in space are entirely different.
Diamonds on Earth are formed under conditions of tremendous heat and pressure, but diamonds in space are located in cold clouds with little to no pressure at all. Scientists believe they would be better able to understand the workings of the Cosmos if they could understand just how carbon is functioning and creating diamonds under such dramatically different conditions. These diamonds still give off a sparkle, just as those on Earth, and that is what the special telescope - the Spitzer Space Telescope - is detecting, the infrared reflections off of the prismatic angles of the tiny diamonds.
So while diamonds give us much pleasure; when we own them in beautiful jewelry, or admire them in the fashions and fancy dress of celebrities and famous people, they also give us a great deal of information about our world. Diamonds are teaching us about our past here on Earth, as they reveal what has caused major or global changes and shaped human destiny, and they reveal to us a part of our future as they drift through outer space. In their many forms and locations they continue to be beautiful and magical objects, and remind us that they are more precious than we all ready imagined.
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