The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered 10,000 light-years into space to trace the origin of buckyballs, which are large and hollow molecules resembling a soccer ball. The gas cloud the observatory imaged, known as Tc1, came from a dying star, in the constellation Ara (Latin for "alter") in the southern hemisphere.
"Tc 1 was already extraordinary, as it was the object that told us buckyballs exist in space, but this new image shows us we had only scratched the surface," Jan Cami, a physics and astronomy professor at Western University in Canada, said in a statement. "The structures we're seeing now are breathtaking, and they raise as many questions as they answer."
Cami also led the team that first found cosmic buckyballs in 2010, a discovery notable enough to be published in the journal Science. That study was conducted using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope which, like JWST, observed in infrared wavelengths.
But Spitzer's mission ended in 2020. JWST, which has a larger mirror and is further away from Earth, can now pick up where Spitzer left off and zoom in on the details.
Ingredients of life
Buckyballs are more properly known by their chemical name, buckminsterfullerene. This form of carbon is named after Buckminster Fuller, a space futurist and architect known for his work on hemispherical structures called geodesic domes. Buckyballs somewhat resemble the domes, which is how they got their name in a 1985 paper led by Harry Kroto at the University of Sussex. Some team members, including Kroto, later earned the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry based on the paper. Decades later, however, the origin story of these carbon spheres remains enigmatic.
Buckyballs are significant as a type of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are a class of organic compounds — essentially, ingredients of life. Each of these PAHs has unique "signatures" or spectra of light, although they share properties because they are part of the same family, Cami said.
Source: www.space.com
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