NASA’s Spitzer finds solid buckyballs in space
25 Feb Science Daily
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have, for
the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in space. Prior to
this discovery, the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in
gas form in the cosmos.
Formally named buckministerfullerene, buckyballs are named after
their resemblance to the late architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic
domes. They are made up of 60 carbon molecules arranged into a hollow
sphere, like a soccer ball.
Their unusual structure makes them ideal candidates for electrical
and chemical applications on Earth, including superconducting materials,
medicines, water purification and armor. In the latest discovery,
scientists using Spitzer detected tiny specks of matter, or particles,
consisting of stacked buckyballs.
They found the particles around a pair of stars called “XX Ophiuchi,”
6,500 light-years from Earth, and detected enough to fill the equivalent
in volume to 10,000 Mount Everests.
“These buckyballs are stacked together to form a solid, like oranges
in a crate,” said Nye Evans of Keele University in England, lead author
of a paper appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society. “
The particles we detected are miniscule, far smaller than the width
of a hair, but each one would contain stacks of millions of buckyballs.”
Buckyballs were detected definitively in space for the first time by
Spitzer in 2010. Spitzer later identified the molecules in a host of
different cosmic environments. It even found them in staggering
quantities, the equivalent in mass to 15 Earth moons, in a nearby galaxy
called the Small Magellanic Cloud. In all of those cases, the molecules
were in the form of gas. The recent discovery of buckyballs particles
means that large quantities of these molecules must be present in some
stellar environments in order to link up and form solid particles. The
research team was able to identify the solid form of buckyballs in the
Spitzer data because they emit light in a unique way that differs from
the gaseous form. “This exciting result suggests that buckyballs are
even more widespread in space than the earlier Spitzer results showed,”
said Mike Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “They may be an important form of carbon,
an essential building block for life, throughout the cosmos.” Buckyballs
have been found on Earth in various forms.
They form as a gas from burning candles and exist as solids in
certain types of rock, such as the mineral shungite found in Russia, and
fulgurite, a glassy rock from Colorado that forms when lightning strikes
the ground.
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