Scientists have spotted a white dwarf star that is slowly crystallising. The star is located just 104 light-years away, practically in our own backyard, as per a report in Science Alert. A paper describing the discovery has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available on preprint website arXiv. According to American space agency NASA, a white dwarf is what stars like the Sun become after they run out of hydrogen, their nuclear fuel, which causes the fusion to cease.
The star named HD 190412 C is turning into a "cosmic diamond", according to Science Alert.
The paper detailing the process of crystallisation says that astronomers have been studying HD 190412 C to understand how the dead remains of certain stars harden into a dense core of crystallised carbon and oxygen.
"In this work we present the discovery of a new Sirius-like quadruple system at 32 parsecs distance, composed of a crystallizing white dwarf companion to the previously known triple HD 190412," the international team of astronomers, led by Alexander Venner of Australia's University of Southern Queensland, said in the research paper.
"By virtue of its association with these main sequence companions, this is the first crystallizing white dwarf whose total age can be externally constrained, a fact that we make use of by attempting to empirically measure a cooling delay caused by core crystallisation in the white dwarf," the team further wrote.
However, we won't be able to witness the cosmic bling in our lifetime as scientists predict this process could take a quadrillion years - that's a million billion years.
Since the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old, it is highly unlikely that astronomers will find one anytime soon.
