Scientists have discovered a star that is in the process of crystallizing into a celestial diamond.
The star is a white dwarf — the shriveled husk of a sun-like star that burned off most of its fuel before collapsing. For stars with cores made mostly of metallic oxygen and carbon, the cooling process that follows the collapse into a white dwarf will ultimately result in the star crystallizing into a giant diamond. However, this process is so slow that researchers don't think any star in the universe has actually become an enormous orb of bling; scientists estimate such a transition would take one quadrillion years, and the universe is only 13.6 billion years old. (A quadrillion is a thousand trillions, and a trillion is a thousand billions.)
