February 16, 2004
» The Diamond in the Sky was the original title of The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. Now they've found a real diamond in the sky, and it's much bigger than the Ritz
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.