Buckyballs finally discovered far out in space

William Atkins
Friday, 23 July 2010 23:49

Science - Space

Astronomers using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescopes have discovered buckyballs for the first time in space. These all-carbon molecules are now considered the largest molecule ever discovered in space. A single buckyball is about 1 nanometer across--about three times larger than a water molecule.

 

Scientists have long thought that buckyballs should exist in outer space. But, until now, they have remained only a possibility.

The researchers from the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, and Cornell University, in the United States, discovered the distinct infrared “signature” of fullerenes (C60) within a cloud of cosmic dust surrounding a star about 6,500 light-years away.

A fullerene (or buckminsterfullerene), is any molecule composed entirely of carbon. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes are similar to the structure of graphite.

There are many different types of fulleneres. Some of them are in the shape of a hollow tube, sphere, or ellipsoid. When they are in the shape of a cylinder, they are described as carbon nanotubes, or buckytubes.

When they are in the shape of a sphere, a fullerene is also called a buckyball. Such a fullerene consists of sixty carbon atoms (C60) with alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons (what looks like a “black-and-white soccer ball”).

They are called “fulleneres” and “bucky” after American designer, inventor, and author Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (1895-1983), who invented and described geodesic domes, of which fullerenes resemble.

A geodesic dome is a structure with interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere.

Page two talks more about the discovery of buckyballs in a long-distance planetary nebula called Tc-1.