A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones 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. The first fullerene to be discovered, and the familys namesake, was buckminsterfullerene (C60), prepared in 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean OBrien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University. The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles. Fullerenes have since been found to occur (if rarely) in nature. The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited
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