Science / Medicine : Scientists Digging Up Diamonds From Space

Scientists in Chicago have been digging for diamonds made in outer space, and they have found them by the billions. Roy Lewis of the University of Chicago and his colleagues reported last week in Nature that they dug the diamonds out of fragments of primitive meteorites in museum collections. They found others in two large meteorites that fell in the late ‘60s--the Murchison in Australia and the Allende in North Mexico.

They found the diamonds by dissolving the rock away from them with hydrochloric acid. What was left were gems, each no more than a few billionths of an inch across. They believe that the diamonds came from distant stars.

Meanwhile, Lewis has hanging around the lab a few milligrams of micro-diamonds. Their number is countless. Their value is purely scientific.

“There is a sufficient number of diamonds . . . that if we got a penny apiece for them, we could retire the U.S. national debt,” Lewis said.