Over the vast, empty reaches of interstellar space, countless small molecules tumble quietly though the cold vacuum. Forged in the fusion furnaces of ancient stars and ejected into space when those stars exploded, these lonely molecules account for a significant amount of all the carbon, hydrogen, silicon, and other atoms in the universe. In fact, some 20 percent of all the carbon in the universe is thought to exist as some form of interstellar molecule. Astronomers have long known that interstellar molecules absorb light from stars and other luminous bodies and believe that these interstellar molecules may be the source of the hundreds of Diffuse Interstellar Bands that show up in spectrograms of space taken from Earth -- the hundreds of seemingly random dark absorption lines. Now researchers are pointing to an unusual set of molecules -- silicon-terminated carbon chain radicals -- as a possible source of these mysterious bands.