Astronomers using the NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as fullerenes (and when arranged in a spherical form it is commonly called a buckyball, in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer ball shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago. A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Cylinders are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene sheets of linked hexagonal rings; but they may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings.