Spherical carbon cage molecule of 60 carbon atoms.
Core Principles & Analysis
Kroto, Curl, and Smalley discovered it in 1985 by laser-vaporizing graphite, naming it for Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes; the work won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Its truncated-icosahedron cage of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons shares the exact geometry of a soccer ball.
Potassium-doped K3C60 superconducts below about 18 K, and in 2010 the Spitzer Space Telescope detected C60 in a planetary nebula.