Nothing to do with the Mel Brooks film, but scientists have found another clue in a 90-year-old mystery about what space dust is made of, according to BBC News and Chemistry World.
Spaceballs
NASA’s infrared telescope Spitzer has detected buckminsterfullerenes, or buckyballs, in the interstellar medium for the first time, so there is a good chance all life on Earth is, in part, made up of space footballs.
Buckyballs are football-shaped forms of pure carbon. C60, the most recognisable buckyball, is sixty carbon atoms bonded together and looks exactly like a football, but other numbers like C70 are also possible. Scientists are investigating their use in all kinds of applications, such as lubricants, or using them as cages for time-released drugs.
And now they have been found in space, or more precisely in a planetary nebula called Tc1, over 6000 light years away from Earth, by a team at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, led by Jan Cami. This research was originally published in the journal Science.
This is, in the words of buckyball discoverer and Nobel Prize winner Sir Harry Kroto, “convincing evidence that the buckyball has... existed since time immemorial in the dark recesses of our galaxy”.
“All the carbon in your body came from star dust, so at one time some that carbon may have been in the from of buckyballs,” Sir Harry told the BBC.
Space dust, and how to find it
Interstellar medium, or space dust to most people, is mostly made up of clouds of molecules floating in space. Scientists work out what those molecules are by firing different kinds of radiation, such as infra-red light, at the clouds. This gives energy to the molecules and they start to vibrate in very specific ways. When they vibrate they give out energy – just as we do when we shiver – and scientists measure that energy, and can tell from the frequency of the vibration what kind of molecule is vibrating, and even what specific part of the molecule.
They have worked out small molecules before now – mostly these clouds are hydrogen, and they’ve even detected alcohol out there – but these are all between 2 and 13 atoms. Finding C60 is a huge step towards knowing which molecules have been in space for billions of years.
You would think it would not be hard to find: Cami’s team found about 1023 kg of each kind of fullerene, just over a moon's worth, reports Chemistry World.
Why is this important?
Kroto, along with Dick Smalley and Robert Curl, won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the buckyball, and scientists have been working ever since to unlock its potential.
The buckyball and its linear cousin the carbon nanotube have some seriously interesting properties. As materials, they are strong and light, so could be included in products that need those qualities. A famous example is the “space elevator”, an idea from 1895 that tethered the Earth and Moon. It was deemed impossible because no material could stand the tension at those lengths; it’s since been measured that carbon nanotubes would have enough tensile strength. Unfortunately, since we can only grow them to a few centimetres at best, we have a long way to go.
Another potential use is as a lubricant: just as book rolls easily over marbles on a table, a fluid of free-moving buckyballs would act like nanoscale ball bearings. They are quite expensive to manufacture in a pure state and in large quantities, though, so this is not currently feasible.
Closer to reality is using buckyballs as cages for small molecules. Scientists have proposed and even tested using them to hold drugs, which can be released slowly and remove the need for multiple doses. Instead of releasing, they could capture things until needed: there is research investigating buckyballs’ potential for storing hydrogen gas, perhaps useful for future energy storage.
But it was 25 years ago that they were discovered, and in 25 years more we may have found that these little space footballs have uses we had never imagined.