NASA/JPL-CalTech
This artist’s illustration shows an infrared photo of the Small Magellanic Cloud taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The image on the right is a magnified view of an example of a buckyball — 60 carbon atoms arranged like soccer balls.
(NHI Nanoblog) Here’s a cool coincidence: As scientists (and science buffs) around the world celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery of “buckyballs,” NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has allowed researchers to prove that the soccer-ball-like carbon assemblies have been lurking in the cosmos all along.
Buckyballs, aka “buckminsterfullerenes,” are sphere-shaped fullerenes, a family of tiny, hollow carbon molecules. They’re named for for their resemblance to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. If you’ve ever been to Disney’s Epcot, you’ve seen a big one; if you were paying attention to Google’s logo doodle last month, you saw an animated example.
Carbon nanotubes are basically tubular fullerenes, to give another example. As with all nanoparticles, their tiny size defines them, and often gives them extraordinary properties.
Buckyballs were discovered in 1985 by a group of scientists at Rice University and a British researcher, who later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work. In early October, the school held a full-fledged celebration of the buckyball as part of its “Year of Nano” series.
Buckyballs were thought to exist in nature, but rarely. In research published recently, scientists working with the Spitzer Telescope, an orbiting infrared observatory launched in 2003, talk about how they’ve found piles of the spheres around an aging star and in between stars. This is causing quite a stir of excitement in the nano world, as is the revelation that these space buckyballs are in an area rich in hydrogen — something lab researchers thought would contaminate and destroy the carbon.
Why the buckyballs exist where they are — and how they’re formed — remain unclear. But this is another example of how nanomaterials developed in the lab are related to the nano-sized materialsthat nature has made all along, and how scientists are exploring that intersection. Researchers think the space buckyballs might have helped bring some of the basic materials needed for life to Earth.
Man-made buckyballs are another nano building block, and have possible uses in materials like body armor. They’re also a hot topic in nanomedicine. But there are questions about how the substance affects cells: cellular research shows the material can disrupt DNA and may be able to get into cell membranes.