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By Fox Nation
July 23, 2010
The largest molecules ever found in space have been spotted by scientists, it has been reported, and they are called buck balls.
The roughly spherical molecules consist of a “third type of carbon”, after graphite and diamond, which occur widely on Earth.
Bucky balls, on the other hand, have only been created on this planet in laboratories and have never before been proven to exist elsewhere.
The BBC reported that a research group used an infrared telescope owned by NASA to spot the buck balls in “a cloud of cosmic dust surrounding a distant star.”
They were looking for something else when they spotted the infrared signature of large objects that turned out to be buck balls.
The signature came from a star in the southern hemisphere constellation of Ara, 6,500 light-years away.
Bucky balls are molecules made of 60 carbon atoms joined together in a sphere.
Their name is a nod to Richard Buckminster Fuller, who – among other things – created architectural designs for geodesic domes, such as can be seen at Cornwall’s Eden Project.
Source: Fox nation
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