The Diamond Stars: What a Sun Becomes When It Dies

About 48 light-years away sits a dead star with a heart of crystallized carbon — a diamond the size of a planet, heavier than the Sun. It is not rare. Across our galaxy, billions of dying stars are quietly freezing into crystal, and in the deep future, our own Sun will join them. This is the story of white dwarf crystallization: how astronomers using the Gaia spacecraft caught stars in the act of turning solid, how we can "hear" the crystal forming inside a star we can never see into, the famous diamond star nicknamed Lucy, and the strange, beautiful ending that waits for the Sun — and why not a single one has been reached yet, anywhere in the universe. Chapters: 0:00 A diamond in Centaurus 2:00 How a star like the Sun dies 5:00 The pile-up Gaia found 7:30 How a star freezes 10:30 Hearing the crystal 12:30 Lucy, the diamond star 15:00 The Sun's final form — IMAGERY CREDITS • NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center / SDO • NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Simulations and atmospheric visualizations in this film are artistic renderings, not photographs. Real observations are credited above.