February 14, 2004
Celestial bling
Astronomers have just discovered that at the heart of the burned-out star "BPM 37093", there is a diamond that weighs 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That's one followed by 34 zeros. As the Sacramento Bee reports:
The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That's one followed by 34 zeros.
The hunk of celestial bling is an estimated 2,500 miles across, said Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Posted by Clive Thompson at February 14, 2004 12:07 PM
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Dude, De Boers totally wants that thing nuked into atoms, like, right now.
I love how the universe keeps surprising us with its fantastic creations. It reminds me of Douglas Adams' observation in "The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" that, in a basically infinite universe, everything you can imagine, however unlikely, isn't infinitiely unlikely, and therefore probably exists somewhere. Right now, there's a planet orbiting some star where ratchets and screwdrivers grow on trees. And how unlikely is it that there's another planet with human life on it? Pretty unlikely. But impossible? Who can say. Thus, there is an incredibly small chance -- but a chance nonetheless -- that there are other humans Out There.
thanks for the diamond tip!
Sure, SPACE may be infinite, but is there an infinite amount of MATTER in space? Probably not, or there wouldn't be much debate about whether there was enough matter in the universe to cause a Big Crunch or not.
If not, then extremely unlikely events may still be somewhat rare, and the old Star Trek theory of parallel development (i.e., two planets both producing, for example, the Nazi Party) probably wouldn't hold up.
Well, matter may not be infinite, but there is probably still enough of it be, for practical purposes, nearly infinite -- i.e. to allow for a nigh-infinite supply of ontological monkeys typing away at reality.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Where's the proof?
Really? Stupid? You're not an engineer are you? :)
The spirit in which it was offered, and in which Adams first wrote about it, is to get you to think about the Universe as a really, really, really big place, with a near-endless variety of forms and behaviours.
And when it comes to Cosmology, I doubt we've really proven much of anything, given the limits of our measuring equipment, the chronological window we can access, and the size of our brains.
But I can't see the harm in trying...
Wasn't this about a big diamond?
I'm sure Liz Taylor is getting whet just thinking about it....
I wonder how long it will be before some Allah freak says it's one of the diamonds from Allahs virgins' rings that just "fell off" during some rough fore-play?
Remember the other two books of Mr. Clark's "2001" series? One of the books (I think it was "2061") has the TMA Monoliths as Von neumann probes converting Jupiter into a mini sun for Io or Europa. A piece of Jupiter explodes and lodges itself into Europa. The piece is a mountain-sized diamond, many times larger than Everest.
Dude! That was 2010 (they didn't cover that in the movie, just the novel)! I remember that now!
Will that Arthur C. Clarke ever cease to amaze?
