[ad_1]
If you expect to encounter strange objects floating in nothingness, this is space.
NASA has been observing for a decade the curious phenomenon known as buckyballs – spherical carbon molecules that move like Jello – but its Hubble Space Telescope is now even stranger. Seems these things have a flavor. Scientists analyzing Hubble's recent observations revealed that they tended to bounce back into the spectrum of reddish stars; Jello with cherry, apparently. Aside from dessert references, these micro-blobs could tell us things we had never imagined about deep space.
As NASA learned after the first visit of its Spitzer Space Telescope in 2010, these balls Buckminsterfullerene (named after the geodesic sphere of the artist Richard Buckminster Fuller reminiscent of the Disney spaceship) are the largest space molecule we knew. They were first discovered in the star clouds of a planetary nebula. Consisting of 60 carbon atoms linked together by a spherical 3D shape of pentagons and hexagons, buckyballs form when a star gets rid of a carbon-rich material during the course of a day. a certain phase of his life.
Even NASA compared them to Jello – their 174 different vibration patterns make them look like some kind of supernatural gelatin under a microscope.
What Hubble has found is all the more surprising as it is the first evidence of charged buckyballs oscillating in the interstellar medium, or dust and gas swirling between the stars. The team of scientists behind the new study, recently published in The letters of the astrophysical journal, developed on the light bands emitted by 11 stars. As starlight passed through the interstellar medium, the wavelengths of energy, or spectra, of these light bands were scanned with the new Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). Signals of light absorption told them that they had found buckyballs.
STIS is more accurate than Hubble in separating signals from background noise when recording these signals, and what excited the team about this is that it can give us a better idea of the types of molecules that we can hope to discover in space. Regarding the "flavor" of cherry (or strawberry), most buckyballs were found in the spectrum of red stars because these stars appeared in this way as a result of the scattering of light in the interstellar medium . We did not find them bouncing around other stars.
What scientists want to know now is the relationship buckyballs have with stars and planets far beyond ours. They have the potential to illuminate aspects of interstellar physics. Could this mean the possibility of finding carbon-based life forms, like us and everything on this planet, somewhere else? Nobody knows.
If and when we discover extraterrestrial life, it may not even need carbon. Someone, somewhere, will now be inspired to make a film about the Jello space.
(via LiveScience)
[ad_2]
Source link