14 DAY TRIAL // While investigating a binary star system located about 6,500 light-years from Earth, astronomers found tiny specs of matter which they say are made up of stacked buckyballs. These are carbon nanospheres, structures that resemble architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes.
Scientists first found buckminsterfullerenes in space in 2010, but the discovery has never been fully confirmed. The new investigation – which was conducted using data from the infrared NASA Spitzer Space Telescope – provided all the required data.
One of the most important aspects of this discovery was the fact that the buckyballs were discovered to exist in a stacked layout, but also in a solid form. The 2010 study had only identified the gaseous form of these nanoscale carbon spheres.
These structures have extremely precise shapes and internal arrangements. Each is made of 60 carbon molecules that look like a hollow sphere. This type of setup is very rare in nature, and scientists hypothesize that these materials could be useful for a wide variety of applications here on Earth.
Researchers say that they could be used to create new superconducting materials, or improve on existing ones. Additionally, buckyballs could set up the foundation for new drugs, advanced water purification systems and new forms of armor for vehicles and personnel.
The fact that they were discovered in such high concentrations around the XX Ophiuchi binary system had astronomers puzzled. They were expecting to see the carbon spheres, but not so many of them, and certainly not in their solid form.
“These buckyballs are stacked together to form a solid, like oranges in a crate. The particles we detected are minuscule, far smaller than the width of a hair, but each one would contain stacks of millions of buckyballs,” scientist Nye Evans explains.
The expert holds an appointment with the Keele University in England. He is also the lead author of a new paper detailing the discovery. The work is published in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
But buckyballs can also be found in one of the Milky Way's companion dwarf galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Within this structure, previous studies identified large amounts of the stuff, the mass equivalent of 15 Moons.
“This exciting result suggests that buckyballs are even more widespread in space than the earlier Spitzer results showed. They may be an important form of carbon, an essential building block for life, throughout the cosmos,” scientists Mike Werner adds.
He holds an appointment as a Spitzer project scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California. The Lab manages the telescope for the Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters, in Washington, DC.