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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.'"
Proto- replicators. Watch them grow and take over the galaxy.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
They are made up of 60 carbon atoms arranged into a hollow sphere, like a soccer ball.
Like say, asteroid sized hunks of buckyballs. That would be pretty cool, as currently we have to manually produce all of them ourselves. From what I've heard they have some pretty useful properties that we've only just started to make use of...
May the Schwartz be with you.
Buckyballs have been discovered in nature before. When this first happened it was somewhat surprising because they seemed difficult to synthesize. But they've since been discovered in a variety of natural contexts. One really neat example is how they've been found in craters from meteorites, apparently produced during the formation of the craters as well as by forest fires in some limited circumstances- http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Feb01/permianImpact.html. One neat thing about this is that since buckyballs are large and hollow, they can when they form actually trap small atoms, generally atoms that are noble gasses (especially helium and argon). So, looking at what these buckyballs have can give us information about the atmospheres and conditions where the buckyballs formed. This is overall part of a large trend in the last twenty years where we've learned how many alternate carbon structures there are. Chemists used to think that while carbon had great versatility when combined with other elements (hence the large variety of chemicals used in life) that the chemistry of pure carbon was fairly prosaic. Since then, the discovery of buckyballs, nanotubes, and other structures have shown that carbon has complicated and interesting chemistry even in its pure form.
The work being done here is part of the general work done by the infrared Spitzer telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescopewhich has been as a whole really amazing for all sorts of astronomy. There are some really neat and entertaining videos explaining the work they've done, like this one with Felicia Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRJeaNtxN4. Unfortunately, Spitzer ran out of coolant in 2009, which substantially reduces which instruments can be used and how precise observations it can make. One major good thing about Spitzer is that it isn't in Eart orbit but is rather in orbit around the sun, so we don't need to worry about it becoming a space debris problem, or need to worry about bringing it down early before it dies (to prevent orbital bombardment), so we can keep getting good data from it until the very last instrument croaks.
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.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I don't know... This looks Photoshop to me.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You are assuming there is gravity....
Good-bye
And I thought they were talking about this magnetic toy that I have a few sets of and thought how odd. http://www.getbuckyballs.com/
Oranges in a crate form a solid? I thought the crate still gave it the overall structure? Take away the crate, and the oranges all come tumbling down.
Perhaps piled like cannonballs is a better analogy. Although in a grocery store, you can see piles of oranges w/o a crate.
Of course "tumbling down" is just because the earth's gravitational forces are larger than the forces that bind the oranges to each other (electrostatic and gravitational). Without the earth's gravity, you don't get "down"...
BTW, theoretical work on this has been going on for a while, it's only the recent observation that is newsworthy...
So all of Jack's old cosmic comics were right...
Next thing you know Stan Lee will be taking credit for buckyballs.
Might just be bubble tea...
ugly bags of water
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
Who installed a microscope in the telescope mount?
then you have a plausible mechanism for biogenesis.
Or at very least a Star Trek episode script.
No, the crate just bears some weight at the edges because the attraction between oranges is weak compared to gravity. Oranges in a crate are stacked just like carbon atoms in graphite, and graphite's certainly a solid.
There IS gravity, why do you think the buckyballs stick together? It's the gravitational attraction between the buckyballs themselves.
Free Martian Whores!
ugly bags of mostly water
Different episode but FTFY anyway.
It looks a lot more like Blender to me, too much 3d in there to be Photoshop.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
true, i should have said 'you are assuming there is enough third-party caused gravity to overcome the gravity between the buckeyballs.'
Good-bye
I find this kind of bullsh*t mind blowing that some telescope can detect microscopic formations of bucky balls in space. Not space dust, not some kind of gaseous cloud, but actual god-damned bucky ball formation the width of a human hair.
And to what point. So what, I say. There is tonnes of crap deep in the cosmos that we can't even fathom, let alone detect, but now we know there are bucky balls out there somewhere, woohoo.
I think astronomers make sh*t up just to justify their lives. "Hey look, bucky balls exist in outer space, that is significant, how about handing us another 100 million dollars". And 20 years later they send up another telescope to determine in finer detail the structure of the bucky ball formation just so some squints can have meaningful employment for a few decades.
Of course who is going to follow up to prove they actually exist...other astronomers. No everyday-man is ever going to follow up on whether this is truth or not. "How do you know they exist out there?" they will ask. And after a barrage of bullsh*t math and physics terminology the everyday-guy is somehow supposed to be satisfied that this discovery is relevant and factual and will somehow apply to reality. Astronomy is purely self-fulfilling. There are no benefits to mankind that can ever be determined by pointing a telescope into space except to figure out someones fortune.
Sorry, I don't give a flying f*ck about bucky balls in space and if I found out my tax dollars were wasted on the effort I would be outraged. Solve the energy crisis first, solve global warming, solve cancer and discease, solve world hunger, solve any number of more meaningful pursuits. Once you are done and there is nothing left to solve, then spend your time finding out about spaceballs.
I can't imagine someone being more vapid then to write an article about bucky balls in space where there is real problems in the world. And they wonder why there is a growing concern over "anti-science" among the Internet masses. Its sh*t like this that makes you want to burn down the observatory.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
No, the crate just bears some weight at the edges because the attraction between oranges is weak compared to gravity. Oranges in a crate are stacked just like carbon atoms in graphite, and graphite's certainly a solid.
Actually, oranges in a crate are stacked more like carbon atoms in C60 (a buckminster fullerene). The atoms in graphite (stacked graphene) are more akin to stacked egg cartons as graphite is organized in layers.
This is gonna make it tough for those Buckeys to reproduce.
then you have a plausible mechanism for biogenesis.
Or at very least a Star Trek episode script.
Star Tek scripts don't require plausible, or even reference to real stuff like graphene.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I would very much like a knowledgeable person to explain how it can be that a telescope can be used to find molecule-size phenomena, when we have so often heard that we can't use a telescope to verify if there actually is NASA hardware on the moon "because it's too small to detect".
I once read a very good article (link long lost) about optical mirror angles, focus, and relative sizes of stuff in distant nebulae and on the moon surface. I wonder if a similar explanation exists for detecting these molecules.
Well, in the meantime, I'd better go RTFA!
"Good news, everyone!"
then you have a plausible mechanism for biogenesis.
Or at very least a Star Trek episode script.
Star Tek scripts don't require plausible, or even reference to real stuff like graphene.
Yeah, they leave all the real science stuff to hard sci-fi films like Star Wars.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Actually, oranges in a crate are stacked more like carbon atoms in C60 (a buckminster fullerene). The atoms in graphite (stacked graphene) are more akin to stacked egg cartons as graphite is organized in layers.
The carbon atoms in C60 aren't stacked, they form a hollow sphere and they're distinctly not like stacked oranges. At this point it's probably easier to be specific. Oranges, like any other collection of weakly-interacting spheres, are stacked HCP or FCC. HCP and FCC are nearly the same and both can be viewed as consisting of "layers".
If they're only now finding these structures in space, could buckyballs be part of the missing "dark" matter?
8-PP