© Dean Knuth/Arizona Daily StarRetired UA professor Donald Huffman is back in the lab doing research. Buckyballs were identified on Earth in 1985.
Astronomers have recently discovered scads of them - enough floating around one single star, they say, to create three planets the size of Mercury.
Retired UA Regents Professor Donald Huffman knew they were there.
It was, in fact, the puzzling signals he and other physicists were getting from space that propelled them to look for buckyballs in laboratories on Earth.
They were found in 1985 by Sir Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley - a discovery that won the team a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996.
Five years after that discovery at Rice University in Texas, Huffman and a German colleague, Wolfgang Krätschmer, figured out how to make buckyballs in a process so simple that it was quickly duplicated in high school chemistry labs:
Zap some graphite rods with electricity in a helium-filled atmosphere and presto - buckyballs.
The Rice team got the Nobel Prize and shortly after that a first patent on the process for making them.
Huffman had to wait until last year for his patent to be approved, and by that time, it had long ago been sold off by the University of Arizona.
He said he made enough money on the discovery to equal a Nobel Prize split three ways, but "it's not same thing."
Now, 25 years after the discovery, Huffman is excited that astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope have found evidence for the complex carbon molecule in near and distant galaxies.
This could have been a year of nostalgia tours for the big discovery.
Huffman headlined an international symposium in Crete and addressed the 25th anniversary celebration of the Nobel discovery at Rice University.
The discoveries in space and the award of the Nobel Prize in physics this year for another carbon form, graphene, made the subject much more topical, he said.
Huffman said it's enough to send him back to the lab with some new ideas 10 years after his retirement from the University of Arizona.
The buckyball, or buckminsterfullerene, was named for inventor Buckminster Fuller because it resembled Fuller's design for geodesic domes.
The structure is a hollow sphere of 60 carbon atoms linked in a framework of hexagons and pentagons that resembles Fuller's dome, or the more familiar structure of the soccer ball.
Before discovery, carbon was known to exist naturally in crystalline form only in graphite and diamonds.
After Huffman and Krätschmer discovered how to easily create buckyballs, they identified its spectral signature. Now astronomers would know exactly where to look for them in space.
"Everybody looked," Huffman said. "Nobody found anything until this year."
In June, a team headed by Canadian physicist Jan Cami, using data from Spitzer's infrared spectrometer, reported in the journal Science that buckyballs had been identified around a dying star in our galaxy.
The latest discoveries, published last week in Astrophysical Letters, add four more locations to the cosmic stock of Carbon 60 and Carbon 70, a larger molecule often compared to a rugby ball.
A team that included Letizia Stanghellini, of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, used the Spitzer space telescope to find fullerenes in three locations in our own galaxy and 200,000 light-years away, around a dying star in the galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Astronomers finally had the tools to find molecules that had been theorized for decades.
"It was the right telescope at the right time," Stanghellini said.
Huffman said he reviewed the infrared spectrographic signature found by Stanghellini's team and said there is no doubt about what they found. "I have never seen a match this good in astronomy."
He is not as convinced by their theories about how the buckyballs came to be in space, and he doesn't think anyone should be impressed by the amount found.
Huffman was amused to read press releases about "bucket loads of buckyballs" that compare the mass found to "three times . . . Mercury" (the National Optical Astronomy Observatory) or "15 moons"(NASA).
"It's the usual NASA hype," Huffman said. "In astronomical terms, it doesn't take much to get a truckload."
For her part, Stanghellini downplays the mass of buckyballs, calling it a "fraction" of the carbon detected, but marveling at its presence in "about 2 percent of the places we looked. So this is intriguing - it is no longer the strange animal."
Carbon 60 is just a small part of what her team discovered, Stanghellini said, and it continues to analyze data gathered during its time on Spitzer a year ago.
Stanghellini is particularly interested in findings that correlate the shape of planetary nebulae with the dominant element in them.
Some nebulae - the glowing halos of gases around dying stars - are butterfly-shaped, and some are round. The former turn out to be oxygen-rich; the round ones have more carbon, she said.
The big surprise noted in the paper was finding buckyballs in places with a heavy hydrogen presence.
Again, Huffman was not surprised. Hydrogen does impede development of buckyballs, he said, but not totally.
He once assigned a graduate student the task of seeing how much hydrogen could be introduced into the experiment. It turns out you can have up to 20 percent hydrogen and still produce buckyballs.
At, 74, Huffman is mostly retired these days, but he retains a physics lab on campus and occasionally employs undergraduates to help him with his inventions.
Huffman is optimistic about future uses of fullerenes, though he thought he'd see many more by now.
Early on, the uses seemed to be endless - super-fabrics, electrical conductors, drug deliverers, etc.
An entire new field of nanotechnology grew up around buckyballs and other fullerenes, including the stretched-out version, the carbon nanotube.
His two best bets at the moment are for a technology that would use buckyballs in organic photovoltaic systems and a Japanese push for creating cosmetics with anti-oxidant qualities.
The Japanese are heavily involved in the research, he said. His patent, finally approved in 2009, is owned by Mitsubishi.
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