Graphene Discovered in Space --Could It Revolutionize Our View of Space-Time?
Physicist Peter Horava, at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks graphere can help us understand what happened immediately after the big bang or what's going on near the event horizon of black holes, where the gravitational fields are massive.
This week, a team of astronomers, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, have reported the first extragalactic detection of the C70 fullerene molecule, and the possible detection of planar C24 ("a piece of graphene") in space. Letizia Stanghellini and Richard Shaw, members of the team at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, describe how collisional shocks powered by the winds from old stars in planetary nebulae could be responsible for the formation of fullerenes (C60 and C70) and graphene (planar C24).
