Fullerene or buckyball | ||||
Spitzer discovered Buckyballs | ![]() | Updated June 01, 2013 | ||
Complex molecules polymerize and assemble to form all structures useful to the cell, thus to life. These monomers are largely made of carbon. Hence the importance of the discovery of buckyballs. Astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have, for the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form, in space. Before this discovery, the microscopic spheres of carbon, had been found only in gaseous form, early in 2010. Formally known as fullerenes, buckyballs have a structure identical to the geodesic dome or soccer ball. The fullerene is also called "buckyballs" or "buckminsterfullerene" in honor of the architect Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic dome. These particularly stable aggregate, consist of 60 carbon atoms, arranged around a hollow sphere. Spitzer has seen these tiny grains of mater, made of buckyballs stacked at 6 500 light years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus, a constellation of the northern hemisphere, crossed by the Sun, from November 29 to December 18. | "This exciting result suggests that these buckyballs are even more common in space than Spitzer shows us," said Mike Werner, Spitzer project scientist Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion in Pasadena, California. Image: The buckyballs are structurally identical to the geodesic dome. The fullerene is also called "buckminsterfullerene" in honor of the architect Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic dome. | ![]() Image: The fullerene is also called "buckyballs". The buckyballs are structurally identical to the ball, (football). Each vertex of the fullerene corresponds to a carbon atom and each side to a covalent bond.![]() | ||
Shungite and fulgurite | ||||
Buckyballs have been found on Earth in various forms. | NB: Fulgurites or "lightning stones" (Latin Lensman which means lightning), are pieces of natural glass very fragile, generally tubular hollow substantially cylindrical, produced by lightning strikes on a rock. | |||
Little story of the evolution | ||||
The little story of the evolution towards the living, starts from nothing. | Quarks A quark (pronounced /ˈkwɔrk/ or /ˈkwɑrk/) is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in isolation; they can only be found within hadrons. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of the hadrons themselves. , electrons The electron is a subatomic particle carrying a negative electric charge. It has no known components or substructure. Therefore, the electron is generally believed to be an elementary particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton. , neutrinos A neutrino, meaning "small neutral one" is an elementary particle that usually travels close to the speed of light, is electrically neutral, and is able to pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected. This makes neutrinos extremely difficult to detect. Neutrinos have a very small, but nonzero rest mass. They are denoted by the Greek letter ν (nu). and their antiparticles in the free state, will emerge from this mysterious empty. Particles and their antiparticles will produce light, lots of light, it is the radiative era. The energy of the strong nuclear force (strong interaction), creates matter, involving quarks of three, this is the time of hadrons which generates the protons and neutrons. At that time, the quarks lose their freedom. Image: Attometers 100 (10-16 m) is the distance we can see the quark. It was not until 1975 that the quarks were detected experimentally. | ![]() |