Forget offering even the triple digit carats now.
When choosing a Valentine’s Day gift for a wife or girlfriend, you can’t go wrong with diamonds. If you really want to impress your favorite lady this Valentine’s Day, get her the galaxy’s largest diamond. But you’d better carry a deep wallet, because this 10 billion trillion trillion carat monster has a cost that’s literally astronomical!
“You would need a jeweler’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond!” says astronomer Travis Metcalfe (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who leads a team of researchers that discovered the giant gem. “Bill Gates and Donald Trump together couldn’t begin to afford it.”
When asked to estimate the value of the cosmic jewel, Ronald Winston, CEO of Harry Winston Inc., indicated that such a large diamond probably would depress the value of the market, stating, “Who knows? It may be a self-deflating prophecy because there is so much of it.” He added, “It is definitely too big to wear!”
The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.
To put that into perspective, it is nearly 400 miles larger in diameter than our Moon.
[Kenobi] That’s no Moon. That’s a diamond![/Kenobi]
Ok, I feel stupid. I never opened your first link. That’s one helluva diamond. New levels of bling. :eek:
I envy the corpse of the girl lucky enough to slip that on her finger.
If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, what does that make this ?
mhendo
November 27, 2008, 5:05am
7
From the article linked by the OP:
When asked to estimate the value of the cosmic jewel, Ronald Winston, CEO of Harry Winston Inc., indicated that such a large diamond probably would depress the value of the market, stating, “Who knows? It may be a self-deflating prophecy because there is so much of it.” He added, “It is definitely too big to wear!”
Here we see encapsulated the biggest fear of the diamond industry: that some day the emotionalism, monopoly, and artificial scarcity that keeps the price of diamonds so high will be broken, and you’ll be able to buy them for a fraction of their current price.
Zoe
November 27, 2008, 6:24am
8
Judging from the photo, that’s a terrible cut…
The only diamond that wears you.
This isn’t really news - the story is four years old.
Szlater
November 27, 2008, 4:26pm
13
Wouldn’t they be entirely worthless, if that massive space diamond was available?
That’s a big-ass rock!
Don’t anyone show my wife this thread – our 10-year anniversary is coming up and I’m pretty sure I can’t afford to buy her something like that!
Meh.
As supply goes up , price comes down .
Try to interest your partner in other gemstones.
The weight in pounds was given as five million trillion trillion, so divide by 2000 for short tons (2.5 thousand trillion trillion) and take about eight-ninths of that for long tons or tonnes, which are about the same. So 2.25 thousand trillion trillion, more or less.
Mind you, there’s inevitably some wastage when it’s cut.
Szlater
November 28, 2008, 5:02pm
17
Malacandra:
The weight in pounds was given as five million trillion trillion, so divide by 2000 for short tons (2.5 thousand trillion trillion) and take about eight-ninths of that for long tons or tonnes, which are about the same. So 2.25 thousand trillion trillion, more or less.
Mind you, there’s inevitably some wastage when it’s cut.
Those numbers are too big for me to comprehend… how many elephants or double-decker buses is that? I need it in a standard tabloid format!
More than enough for everyone in the world to give everyone else in the world an elephant-sized diamond… easily.
