In 1985, chemists vaporized graphite and found a molecule shaped like a soccer ball

Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley were simulating carbon chemistry from dying stars when laser-vaporized graphite kept forming a cluster of exactly 60 carbon atoms. The atoms turned out to form a hollow cage of hexagons and pentagons, identical to a soccer ball, which they named buckminsterfullerene after architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. It won them the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

— Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley, Buckminsterfullerene — Nature, 1985