Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story
BUCKMINSTER FULLER would be so proud. Buckyballs, made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in a geodesic sphere – the shape made famous by the inventor – have been found beyond our galaxy, suggesting they abound in space.
Buckyballs were found in space earlier this year in dust shed by a dying star. Now a group led by Anibal GarcÃa-Hernández at the Astrophysical Institute of the Canaries, Spain, will report in that there is a cloud of the stuff, about 15 times the mass of the moon, around another dying star in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Advertisement
Organic molecules important for life could have been carried to the primordial Earth locked up inside extraterrestrial buckyballs.