Buckminsterfullerene is a type of fullerene with the formula C60. It has a cage-like fused-ring structure (truncated icosahedron) that resembles a soccer ball, made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons. Each carbon atom has three bonds. It is a black solid that dissolves in hydrocarbon solvents to produce a violet solution. The compound has received intense study, although few real world applications have been found. Buckminsterfullerene is the most common naturally occurring fullerene. Small quantities of it can be found in soot. It also exists in space. Neutral C60 has been observed in planetary nebulae and several types of star. The ionised form, C60+, has been identified in the interstellar medium and is the carrier of several diffuse interstellar bands. Theoretical predictions of buckyball molecules appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these reports went largely unnoticed. Buckminsterfullerene was first generated in 1984 by Eric Rohlfing, Donald Cox and Andrew Kaldor using a laser to vaporize carbon in a supersonic helium beam. In 1985 their work was repeated by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley at Rice University, who recognized the structure of C60 as buckminsterfullerene. Kroto, Curl and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in the discovery of buckminsterfullerene and the related class of molecules, the fullerenes.

This NFT description uses material from the Wikipedia article Buckminsterfullerene which is released under the CC-BY-SA