To us, stars may resemble cut jewels, glittering coldly against the velvet darkness of the night sky. And for some of them, that may actually be sort of true.
As a certain type of dead star cools, it gradually hardens and crystallizes. Astronomers have found one doing just that in our cosmic backyard, a white dwarf composed primarily of carbon and metallic oxygen just 104 light-years away, whose temperature-mass profile suggests that the center of the star is transforming into a dense, hard, ‘cosmic diamond’ made up of crystallized carbon and oxygen.
The discovery is detailed in a paper accepted into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available on preprint website arXiv.
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