'Buckyball' Molecules Discovered in Another Galaxy

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected huge quantities of buckyballs -- little spheres of carbon -- in outer space. The background of this artist's illustration is an infrared photo of the Small Magellanic Cloud, taken by Spitzer. The middle pullout shows a magnified view of an example of a planetary nebula, and the right pullout shows an even more magnified depiction of buckyballs, which consist of 60 linked carbon atoms. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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