This morning the BBC reported the discovery of a supernova by a 10 year old:
“Kathryn Gray was studying images taken at an amateur observatory which had been sent to her father. She spotted the magnitude 17 supernova on Sunday.”
Supernovas – which are rare events – are stellar explosions that mark the violent deaths of stars several times bigger than the Sun. The supernova was discovered in the galaxy UGC 3378, about 240 million light years away, in the constellation of Camelopardalis.
Kathryn’s father, Paul Gray, himself an amateur astronomer, helped her make the discovery by taking the steps to rule out asteroids and checking the list of current known supernovas.
The discovery was then verified by independent astronomers and officially registered, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) said in a statement.”
The news had me thinking about one of the theories about the formation of black diamonds.
Geologist Stephen Haggerty of the University of Massachusetts dumbfounded the audience at a 1996 American Geophysical Union meeting in Baltimore. He posited that Carbonados (black diamonds) were born not on Earth, either the way regular diamonds are or by meteor impact. Rather, they originated in dying stars, when shock waves from exploding red giants crushed carbon into dense aggregations of black diamond and sent them hurtling into deep space. Eons later, the Sun’s gravity lured some of this material into our solar system, where blocks of it slammed into our atmosphere, shattering into the fragments we find strewn over select areas today, perhaps billions of years after they formed.
This is what intrigues me most about black diamonds. The color of mystery, the color of depths unexplored; just like the personality of a highly competitive, successful woman. Black diamonds bespeak all this and more, and that is why we are witnessing the surge in their popularity today. Find here black diamond rings, black diamond pendants and black diamond earrings.
Read about other theories of black diamond formation at this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/diamond/sky.html
