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Washington, Mar 3 (ANI): Observations made with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have revealed that buckminsterfullerenes, or ‘buckyballs,’ the largest known molecules in space, are more common than previously thought.

A study of R Coronae Borealis stars by David L. Lambert, Director of The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory, and colleagues found that buckyballs do not occur in very rare hydrogen-poor environments as previously thought, but in commonly found hydrogen-rich environments and, therefore, are more common in space than previously believed.

Buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in shape similar to a soccer ball, with patterns of alternating hexagons and pentagons.

Their structure is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, for which they are named. These molecules are very stable and difficult to destroy.

Richard Curl, Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for synthesizing buckyballs in a laboratory. The consensus based on lab experiments has been that buckyballs do not form in space environments that have hydrogen, because the hydrogen would inhibit their formation. Instead, the idea has been that stars with very little hydrogen but rich in carbon — such as the so-called R Coronae Borealis stars — provide an ideal environment for their

formation in space.

Lambert, along with N. Kameswara Rao of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and Domingo Anibal Garcia-Hernandez of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, put these theories to the test. They used the Spitzer Space Telescope to take infrared spectra of R Coronae Borealis stars to look for buckyballs in their chemical make-up.

They found these molecules do not occur in those R Coronae Borealis stars with little or no hydrogen, an observation contrary to expectation. The group also found that buckyballs do exist in the two R Coronae Borealis stars in their sample that contain a fair amount of hydrogen.

Studies published last year, including one by Garcia-Hernandez, showed that buckyballs were present in planetary nebulae rich in hydrogen.

Together, these results tell us that fullerenes are much more abundant than previously believed, because they are formed in normal and common “hydrogen-rich” and not rare “hydrogen-poor” environments.

The research will appear in the March 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. (ANI)