“Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.

The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

It’s the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.

Astronomers have decided to call the star “Lucy” after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

‘You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond,’ says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.”

—Dr David Whitehouse, BBC News Online science editor, Monday, 16 February, 2004. Ran into this three year old news by way of Fark. An oldie, but a goodie.