Carbon-60 molecules, discovered at Rice, detected in nebula 6,000 light years away

Buckyballs are far out

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

It took a while, but researchers in Canada and California have found something akin to what Harry Kroto was looking for at Rice all those years ago: Buckyballs in space!

The unexpected discovery of buckyballs at Rice 25 years ago resulted from laboratory experiments that were designed to reproduce chains of carbon atoms found in deep space. In an ironic turn of events, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has now turned up unexpected evidence of buckyballs in deep space.

Don’t get the wrong idea — this has nothing to do with Mel Brooks. Analysis of planetary nebula Tc1, the remains of a star about 6,000 light years away, showed a distinct spectral signature for carbon-60 buckminsterfullerenes, the carbon molecule discovered at Rice 25 years ago by the Nobel Prize-winning team of Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl, University Professor Emeritus and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences.

“We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space,” said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space.”

Cami used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in the study, which appeared online last week in the journal Science.

“We did not plan for this discovery,” Cami told NASA. “But when we saw these whopping spectral signatures, we knew immediately that we were looking at one of the most sought-after molecules.”

In 1985, astrophysicist Kroto of the University of Sussex (and now at Florida State) had been looking to synthesize cyanopolyynes, carbon molecules thought to exist in interstellar clouds. He realized Rice had the perfect device to conduct his study, a laser-fired supersonic cluster beam apparatus Smalley had been using to study semiconductor clusters. Kroto rushed to Rice when Curl tipped him off to its availability.

Kroto and Smalley’s graduate students Jim Heath and Sean O’Brien loaded the device with carbon and fired it up. They soon found themselves looking at residue with carbon-60 peaks that begged for explanation – thoroughly derailing Kroto’s interstellar search.

Kroto hasn’t forgotten, though. “This most exciting breakthrough provides convincing evidence that the buckyball has, as I long suspected, existed since time immemorial in the dark recesses of our galaxy,” he told NASA last week.

Kroto will join Curl, O’Brien and Heath at Rice in October for the Week of Nano, the highlight of a yearlong celebration honoring the late Smalley, who was University Professor and the Gene and Norman Hackerman Chair of Chemistry at Rice, and the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the buckyball. The four members of the team will reminisce about their work at the Buckyball Discovery Conference, Oct. 11-14.

For details about the conference and Rice’s Year of Nano, visit http://buckyball.smalley.rice.edu/year_of_nano/.