Mysteries behind interstellar buckyballs finally answered | Hacker News Reader

Mysteries behind interstellar buckyballs finally answered

phys.org

29 pointsdnetesn8 comments

Formation “only possible in lab settings”? I thought the way to make buckyballs was to burn the carbon rods on an arc welder into oblivion, then sift through the debris looking for the Buckyballs you accidentally made without realizing it? Seems like a plausible scenario that could occur anywhere (edit: and wikipedia suggests even occurs in lightning strikes and candle flames.)

Didn’t the original paper lead to a corresponding world shortage in electric arc welders, for a time, as labs bought them all up?

They don’t seem to mention how it was detected in space in the first place.

Is there planetary nebulae in our solar system and it was detected with a spacecraft? If so where did it come from if it came from a dying star?

By vibrational spectroscopy. You compare the microwave / infrared spectrum of a compound measured in the lab, to data from telescopes.

Fullerenes are by far the largest molecules positively identified in space. Due to the high symmetry of the molecules, they have a very specific and quite simple vibrational fingerprint.

https://www.nature.com/articles/369296a0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circu...

The Nature paper describes electronic spectroscopy of the ionized C60+, where light from the near-IR to the UV is used to excite electronic, rather than vibrational or rotational, transitions.

Indeed, this is how the presence of C60+ in the interstellar medium was absolutely confirmed (and was the first assignment of such a near-IR to UV absorption line from the interstellar medium).[0]

The problem with the Ehrenfreud paper is that the spectrum was recorded in frozen neon and the interaction between the analyte (C60+) and its matrix (frozen neon) is strong enough such that the perturbation is larger than the certainty of the positions of the spectral lines. Definitive laboratory assignments therefore require studying the molecules under (as close to) identical conditions as the interstellar environment, including high vacuum and low temperature.

The detection of neutral C60 was, as you say, performed using infrared (vibrational) spectroscopy.[1]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14566

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/329/5996/1180

I mean it makes total sense. Supernova explosions are far more powerful than whatever we create in our labs on earth. Of course they will generate exotic molecules.

Supernovas are better at destroying exotic molecules.

Abstract of article at Astrophysical Journal Letters (full content is paywalled): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab4206

Short general-scientific-audience description from Nature: https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/news/spotlight/origins-buckyball... (PDF at https://www.nature.com/magazine-assets/d41586-019-03139-6/d4...)

University of Arizona press release of which the phys.org "article" is a word-for-word copy: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/mysteries-behind-interstell...

> full content is paywalled

And that's criminal, given this:

> This work was supported by NSF grants AST-1515568, 1531243, AST-1907910, NASA grants NNX15AD94G, NNX15AJ22G, NNX16A31G, NNX12AL47G, 80NSSC19K0509, NIH grant R25GM062584, DOE Contract DE-AC07-051D14517, and the Sloan Foundation Baseline Scholars Program.

But anyway: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ab4206

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