Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered buckyballs' in space (soccer ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere), they're back with stunning images and rich data generated using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - the most powerful space telescope ever built.
The team led by Jan Cami, a physics and astronomy professor, first detected buckyballs using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in 2010. The fantastic find came from the planetary nebula Tc 1, formed from a dying star more than 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara.
These molecules, which contain 60 perfectly arranged carbon atoms, were first synthesized in 1985 at the University of Sussex by Sir Harry Kroto and his colleagues - a breakthrough that earned the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Kroto named the molecule "buckminsterfullerene" after famed architect Buckminster Fuller, who designed and developed geodesic domes, which share the same structural principles.
