Mysterious Space Balls Detected in a Galaxy Beyond the Milky Way

For the first time, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected little spheres of carbon, called buckyballs, in a galaxy beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The space balls were detected in a dying star, called a planetary nebula, within the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud. What's more, huge quantities were found -- the equivalent in mass to 15 of our moons.

One of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away is the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way shown below. At the center of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. Energetic outflows and radiation from hot young stars are eroding the dense outer portions of the star-forming region exposing new stellar nurseries.

"We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space," said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space." Cami has authored a paper about the discovery that will appear online Thursday in the journal Science
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Buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in three-dimensional, spherical structures. Their alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons match a typical black-and-white soccer ball. The research team also found the more elongated relative of buckyballs, known as C70, for the first time in space. These molecules consist of 70 carbon atoms and are shaped more like an oval rugby ball. Both types of molecules belong to a class known officially as buckminsterfullerenes, or fullerenes.


more

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/10/mysterious-space-balls-detected-in-a-galaxy-beyond-the-milky-way.html

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/1212-feature10-18-Spitzer-Goes-Buck-Wild-and-Finds-Buckyballs-Floating-Between-the-Stars

I knew SOMEBODY just HAD to post a picture sooner or later!

:rofl:

The article doesn't mention this so I went looking, first for how they got named after architect/artist Bucky Fuller (it's the geodesic shape, of course) AND for what the discovery of these molecules in outer space means, as to life developing here and elsewhere. Here's the wiki on it:

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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."<2> Fullerenes have since been found to occur in nature.<3> More recently, fullerenes have been detected, along with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), in outer space.<4> According to astronomer Letizia Stanghellini, "It’s possible that buckyballs from outer space provided seeds for life on Earth.”<5> PAHs have also been implicated in the origin of life (see PAH world hypothesis).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene

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That's exactly what I was wondering--are these the "seeds of life" scattered hither and yon by supernovas? Well, it's still just a speculation but I was glad to see that the issue has been raised, even before the current discovery of huge quantities of carbon buckyballs in our sister galaxy. Buckyballs were only recently discovered on earth. Now we know that they are "out there" in great quantity. And, if they are, indeed, the "seeds of life," combined with other recent discoveries--that earth-sized planets are common in the Universe, and that water is common in our solar system (and has been found in even greater quantities than expected on our moon)--this increases the LIKELIHOOD of life and of sentient life elsewhere by many orders of magnitude. Even a decade ago, I would not have predicted so much progress on this momentous issue. I have always thought that the sheer numbers of galaxies in the known Universe, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars, made other life (than ours) a statistical inevitability--that there being NO other life would be the unusual and weird thing. All these recent discoveries (and there is much more) make sense to me, but I am still astonished by them--astonished by what we humans now know and how fast it has happened.