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Science 25 November 1988:
Vol. 242. no. 4882, pp. 1139 - 1145
DOI: 10.1126/science.242.4882.1139
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Articles

Space, Stars, C60, and Soot

Harold Kroto 1

1 School of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QJ, United Kingdom

Although carbon has been subjected to far more study than all other elements put together, the buckminsterfullerene hollow-cage structure, recently proposed to account for the exceptional stability of the C60 cluster, has shed a totally new and revealing light on several important aspects of carbon's chemical and physical properties that were quite unsuspected and others that were not previously well understood. Most significant is the discovery that C60 appears to form spontaneously, and this has particularly important implications for particle formation in combustion and in space as well as for the chemistry of polyaromatic compounds. The intriguing revelation that 12 pentagonal "defects" convert a planar hexagonal array of any size into a quasi-icosahedral cage explains why some intrinsically planar materials form quasi-crystalline particles, as appears to occur in the case of soot. Although the novel structural proposal has still to be unequivocally confirmed, this article pays particular attention to the way in which it provides convincing explanations of puzzling observations in several fields, so lending credence to the structure proposed for C60.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
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High-Rate, Gas-Phase Growth of MoS2 Nested Inorganic Fullerenes and Nanotubes.
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Fullerenes in the 1.85-billion-year-old Sudbury impact structure.
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Annealing C60+: Synthesis of Fullerenes and Large Carbon Rings.
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Fullerenes from the Geological Environment.
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Phase Transformations in Carbon Fullerenes at High Shock Pressures.
C. S. YOO and W. J. NELLIS (1991)
Science 254, 1489-1491
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Compressibility of Solid C60.
J. E. FISCHER, P. A. HEINEY, A. R. MCGHIE, W. J. ROMANOW, A. M. DENENSTEIN, J. P. MCCAULEY JR., and A. B. SMITH III (1991)
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Tunable far-IR laser spectroscopy of jet-cooled carbon clusters: the nu 2 bending vibration of C3.
C. Schmuttenmaer, R. Cohen, N Pugliano, Heath JR, A. Cooksy, K. Busarow, and R. Saykally (1990)
Science 249, 897-900
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Is Soot Composed Predominantly of Carbon Clusters?.
L. B. Ebert (1990)
Science 247, 1468-1471
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Studies of unusual simple molecules by neutralization-reionization mass spectrometry.
F. McLafferty (1990)
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Detection of C5 in the Circumstellar Shell of IRC+10216.
P. F. BERNATH, K. H. HINKLE, and J. J. KEADY (1989)
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)