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W2:Something New - Nested Buckyball

This is a photo of my new carbon fiber nested buckyball I have added to my collection … It is technically called a Buckminsterfullerene which is the smallest fullerene molecule containing pentagonal and hexagonal rings in which no two pentagons share an edge (which can be destabilizing, as in pentalene). It is also most common in terms of natural occurrence, as it can often be found in soot.

 

The empirical formula of buckminsterfullerene is C60 and its structure is a truncated icosahedron, which resembles an association football ball of the type made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, with a carbon atom at the vertices of each polygon and a bond along each polygon edge.

 

The van der Waals diameter of a buckminsterfullerene molecule is about 1.1 nanometers (nm). The nucleus to nucleus diameter of a buckminsterfullerene molecule is about 0.71 nm.

 

The buckminsterfullerene molecule has two bond lengths. The 6:6 ring bonds (between two hexagons) can be considered "double bonds" and are shorter than the 6:5 bonds (between a hexagon and a pentagon). Its average bond length is 1.4 Å.

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Uploaded on January 12, 2022
Taken on January 11, 2022