How was buckyball discovered?
As with many important scientific discoveries, buckyball was discovered by accident. In 1985, the American chemist R. E. Smalley at Rice University, the British chemist H. F. Kroto at Sussex, and graduate students working under their direction were studying the nature of interstellar matter. They wanted to know what forms of carbon-containing materials can be found between the stars. The overall strategy of the research was to compare spectroscopic readings from unidentified matter in interstellar space with those obtained from well-characterized materials in the laboratory. If a match is found, then one can infer the nature of the interstellar matter. This strategy reveals a fundamental principle of the rules describing matter: they apply equally throughout the universe. The intrinsic properties (such as color, mass, etc.) exhibited by diamond or graphite or buckyball in space are identical to those on earth. When buckyball was discovered, Kroto and his coworkers already knew that lon
