Star gazing: do buckyballs exist in space?

A few years ago the focus of a BBC Horizon programme was the discovery of C₆₀, buckminsterfullerene (buckyball), and the family of similar carbon-cage molecules, the fullerenes. The fullerenes were discovered in 1985 by British chemist Sir Harry Kroto and colleagues in the US. The chemists were doing laboratory experiments designed to probe the chemistry involved when molecules are first created in the atmospheres of cool, red, giant stars, and then ejected into the interstellar medium (ISM) or ‘space’. It was an accidental discovery – a great example of serendipity and led to the award of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1996.