Solid Buckeyballs Detected In Space

astroengine writes with an excerpt from an article at Discovery: "For the first time, 'buckyballs' have been discovered in the cosmos in a solid form. Until now, the only evidence in space for the bizarre little hollow balls of carbon atoms have been in interstellar gases, but with the help of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered buckyballs accumulating and stacking atop one another to form solid particles. 'These buckyballs are stacked together to form a solid, like oranges in a crate,' said Nye Evans of Keele University in England, lead author of a paper appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 'The particles we detected are minuscule, far smaller than the width of a hair, but each one would contain stacks of millions of buckyballs.'"

Comments

Re:Crystalline Entity!!

[History's Coming To]

You may have a point in a roundabout way. This is similar to sheets of graphene that have also been discovered. Now, imagine that the graphene or C60 is contaminated with trace amounts of N, O, P and H - the carbon is going to form a substrate on which random combinations of the containments are brought together, and if it's constantly being broken up and reforming due to, for example, UV then you have a plausible mechanism for biogenesis.