Happy New Year everyone, and what a great way to welcome 2008. Lucy, more affectionately known as BPM 37093 to her close friends, is roughly ten billion trillion trillion carats and measures about 4,000 kilometers in diameter. I bet she looses at least 30% of her weight when she’s finally cut and polished.

Discovered by Travis Metcalf and his team at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Lucy is a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

I wonder how it would grade out at GIA? I bet it’s pretty near flawless.