The mystery of fullerenes in space explained

A study from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) which combines laboratory chemistry with astrophysics, has shown for the first time that grains of dust formed by carbon and hydrogen in a highly disordered state, ...

Flat fullerene fragments attractive to electrons, shows study

Researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have gained new insights into the unique chemical properties of spherical molecules composed entirely of carbon atoms, called fullerenes. They did it by making flat fragments of the ...

Monometallic endohedral azafullerene synthesized for first time

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Yang Shangfeng from the University of Sciences and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) synthesized La@C81N, a type of monometallic endohedral azafullerene ...

New material proposed for perovskite solar cells

A new type of material for solar cells was proposed by specialists of the Ural Federal University (UrFU) and the Institute of Organic Synthesis of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences together with their colleagues. ...

Scientists synthesize new, ultra-hard material

Russian scientists have synthesized a new ultra-hard material consisting of scandium containing carbon. It consists of polymerized fullerene molecules with scandium and carbon atoms inside. The work paves the way for future ...

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Fullerene

A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and they resemble the balls used in association football. Cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings.

The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family's namesake, buckminsterfullerene (C60), was prepared in 1985 by Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, James Heath, Sean O'Brien, and Harold Kroto at Rice University. The name was an homage to Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles. The structure was also identified some five years earlier by Sumio Iijima, from an electron microscope image, where it formed the core of a "bucky onion." Fullerenes have since been found to occur in nature. More recently, fullerenes have been detected in outer space. According to astronomer Letizia Stanghellini, "It’s possible that buckyballs from outer space provided seeds for life on Earth.”

The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. Buckyballs and buckytubes have been the subject of intense research, both for their unique chemistry and for their technological applications, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.

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