Buckyballs in space solve 100-year-old riddle
Carbon cages floating in the space between the stars have been confirmed as the cause of cosmic-light features that have puzzled astronomers for almost 100 years.
In 1919, Mary Lea Heger, a graduate student at the University of California’s Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, saw that particular wavelengths of light were dimmed in the emissions from certain stars, in a way that seemed unrelated to the stars themselves. As astronomers spotted more such features, they attributed them to molecules in the interstellar gas that absorb wavelengths of light on their way to Earth, and called them diffuse interstellar bands (DIB). Some 400 DIBs have now been observed, from across the Milky Way and beyond.
Dust grains, carbon chains and even floating bacteria emerged as candidates to explain these features, but none proved conclusive. Now, a laboratory analysis of the light absorbed by buckyballs — hollow, soccer-ball shaped molecules made up of 60 carbon atoms — under space-like conditions has provided direct match for DIBs seen in 19941. They are the first DIBs to be explained.
The finding, published in Nature on 15 July2, opens the door to identifying other molecules floating in interstellar space. “As far as I'm concerned this is the scientific paper of the year,” says Harry Kroto, the British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene with colleagues Robert Curl and Richard Smalley.
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http://www.nature.com/news/buckyballs-in-space-solve-100-year-old-riddle-1.17987?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
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