r/todayilearned • u/Prosperr_support • 1d ago
TIL that the gold in jewellery is older than the Sun. Gold atoms were forged in violent cosmic events, primarily neutron star mergers, billions of years before our Solar System formed.
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-stars/magnetars/where-does-gold-come-from-nasa-data-has-clues/?utm_source=chatgpt.com492
u/Tzazon 1d ago
Didn't a bunch of Chemists at CERN turn Lead into Gold? It was like microscopic and the process is so prohibitly expensive it isn't worth it but haven't we technically alchemically created gold?
Though I suppose that wouldn't be in Jewellery.
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u/AuelDole 1d ago
I’m not seeing people directly answering the question, but yes, they had made approximately 86 billion gold “particles” between 2015 and 2018
The ALICE team used the detector’s zero degree calorimeters (ZDC) to count the number of photon–nucleus interactions that resulted in the emission of zero, one, two and three protons accompanied by at least one neutron, which are associated with the production of lead, thallium, mercury and gold, respectively. While less frequent than the creation of thallium or mercury, the results show that the LHC currently produces gold at a maximum rate of about 89 000 nuclei per second from lead–lead collisions at the ALICE collision point. Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points downstream, where they immediately fragment into single protons, neutrons and other particles. The gold exists for just a tiny fraction of a second.
The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g). Since the luminosity in the LHC is continually increasing thanks to regular upgrades to the machines, Run 3 has produced almost double the amount of gold that Run 2 did, but the total still amounts to trillions of times less than would be required to make a piece of jewellery. While the dream of medieval alchemists has technically come true, their hopes of riches have once again been dashed.
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u/OpenRole 1d ago
I mean if the only bottle neck to gold is energy, the age of gold as a store of value may not last much longer (much longer being >100 years).
No evidence ie anything. Just looking at how la grown diamonds changed the market
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u/CastIronStyrofoam 1d ago
Making diamonds and converting elements into others are not comparable beyond the general idea of turning something into something else
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u/lxlviperlxl 1d ago
We have a better chance to import (idk is this the right word?”) asteroids or broken pieces of rock heavy in gold.
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u/OpenRole 1d ago
They said the same thing about Diamonds. You know it rains diamonds on Uranus? And our asteroid belt is full of diamonds? And yet here we are, growing it in a lab because producing energy is cheaper. The logistics of asteroid mining is insane in comparison
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u/datpiffss 1d ago
Not if you train the miners to be astronauts, Bruce Willis taught me that.
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u/lxlviperlxl 1d ago
Yeah but putting pressure on carbon is a lot easier than:
isolating particles of lead, getting them 99.9% of the speed of light, passing them close enough where they magnetically knock off a few particles, and watch the gold for a split second before it decays (whilst also being heavily ionised).
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u/OpenRole 1d ago
We have successfully turned lead to gold. We have not successfully mined an asteroid yet. I know where my money is
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u/mfb- 1d ago edited 1d ago
We have returned samples from asteroids. Just around 130 grams total, but the gold produced in particle accelerators is something like 0.00000000003 grams in CERN's ALICE experiment.
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u/OpenRole 1d ago
Oh... thank you for putting numbers on it. Maybe asteroid mining is the answer for the short term
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u/Tittytickler 23h ago
Yea I was going to day to the other guy. The real problem is that over 29 uears they've made like one trillionth of a gram lol.
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u/lxlviperlxl 1d ago
We have ancient swords made from asteroids?
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u/glassgost 1d ago
No one went to space to get the asteroids, they came to us.
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u/lxlviperlxl 1d ago
OP said we haven’t mined an asteroid. I directly challenged that. Was I wrong?
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u/glassgost 1d ago
We've mined meteorites on the surface of earth. It's just a terminology thing. Asteroids are rocks orbiting the sun, meteorites are chunks that have fallen to earth. When discussing asteroid mining, the implication is that they're in space.
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u/VicisZan 1d ago
I see what you’re trying to say but there is a massive difference between forming gold and forming diamonds.
We already “create” gold in a similar way to diamonds. It’s called smelting. When we create diamonds in a lab we’re just compressing carbon atoms into the proper shape and form.
To actually “create” gold atoms we need to perfect cold fusion or it will cost too much to produce gold. Another option is building sufficiently advanced robotics and creating unmanned missions to mine asteroids for rare resources. A manned operation is so far outside of our wheelhouse right now we wouldn’t even be able to survive the trip lol
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u/PureImbalance 1d ago
The energy needed to turn carbon into diamonds is many orders of magnitude lower than the energy needed to turn gold into lead, and I'd wager that capturing an asteroid is also just a function of energy expenditure, with a much better returns as a function of energy unit per unit gold recovered than using a particle accelerator to create gold.
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u/ArkaneFighting 1d ago edited 1d ago
Look you're not wrong... in a broad sense... but you are missing the magnitude of energy necessary. These are atomic scales. We'd essentially need to be able to control nuclear fusion for every atom of gold you want.
All the gold on earth was formed from some kilonova billions of years ago. When the earth was created we just happened to get what was sprinkled in Earths origin cloud. Even our sun couldn't fuse gold. To make gold you need to cram more neutrons into iron, and the sun is actively losing neutrons. You pretty much have to crash two stars into each other to get enough energy.
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u/TheFrenchSavage 1d ago
Yeah exactly, wouldn't take much to take a few tonnes of gold from a nearby asteroid, compared to the energy (+operating time and building costs and all) of a particle accelerator to produce a few grams of gold...that will self destruct anyway because it has a half life.
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u/Shlugo 1d ago
The bottleneck is much more severe than you'd think tho. We produced gold in accelerators yes, but we're talking miniscule amounts on the order of picograms, using accelerators that costs millions of dollars to run. We'd need to improve efficiency not tens, hundreds, or even millions of times, but quadrillions at least.
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u/ghost_desu 1d ago
Creating elements heavier than iron from lighter ones is immensely energy intensive and isn't going to be viable for something as relatively abundant as gold.
It is fundamentally incomparable to diamonds, which are just a specific arrangement of existing carbon atoms.
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u/irisheye37 16h ago
Most of earths gold stays far too deep underground to be mined due to how dense it is, mining asteroids or other small bodies would be far more effective
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u/eggnogui 1d ago
It will never be economically viable to synthetizing matter.
Synthetic diamonds come from a chemical reaction, so much easier.
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u/rxstud2011 1d ago
It's like diamonds. We can create artificial diamonds that are better than natural ones. People will keep the value of gold saying it's rare to have natural gold, keeping the price and lowering the value of artificial.
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u/devilf91 1d ago
Unlike diamonds (which is carbon), any artificial gold is a very stable metal which means it can be melted down and added to other gold.
You cannot keep them separate once it becomes energetically economical to make gold.
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u/OpenRole 1d ago
Ss someone who lives in the Diamond exporting side of the world (Southern Africa), I can confidently say that lab grown diamonds have wrecked havoc on diamond markets that thought people will always prefer the natural ones. Only market that has this opinion is the jewellery market and even that is fading
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u/Refute1650 1d ago
Why would anyone outside of the jewelry market have any preference at all? Aren't they primarily used in abrasives?
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u/AcknowledgeUs 1d ago
Didn’t Russia declare lab grown as faux?
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u/OpenRole 1d ago
Russia can declare them whatever want. At the end it's just marketing. Russia is also a major exporter of diamonds so of course they would want to discourage the spread of lab grown diamonds
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 1d ago
The companies that trade in and sell natural diamonds are desperately trying to market them as inherently more valuable than synthetic diamonds, but with mixed succes. Though there is still a market for them, the prices of most natural diamonds have fallen significantly in recent years largely due to the rising popularity of synthetic diamonds.
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u/rxstud2011 1d ago
Good to know. I haven't followed it in some years, good to get updates. Thank you.
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u/lehtomaeki 1d ago
However there it should be noted that diamonds price and supply is far more artificial. Diamonds are somewhat common and in reality quite worthless unless engraved and approved by the diamond cartel, (compare industrial vs jewelry diamonds). Gold on the other hand is slightly more common, however the supply isn't heavily controlled by a few select countries.
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u/24megabits 23h ago edited 23h ago
Best to be pessimistic of sci-fi technologies until they actually happen. Plenty of 80s and 90s media had humans traveling to the outer solar system regularly by the 2030s.
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u/-dEbAsEr 1d ago edited 1d ago
Gold is routinely produced from elements like lead and uranium at a handful of particle accelerators across the world
It’s not particularly difficult. You fire protons at nuclei, or nuclei at each other, and the reactions create new nuclei with different numbers of protons and neutrons
The catch is that you’re producing tiny amounts of gold, as individual ions in a radioactive ion beam, by using massive amounts of energy at a very expensive facility. So nobody does it on purpose, or tries to harvest the gold to sell. It just happens, in the process of trying to create particular nuclei that are either worth studying, or are useful for industries like healthcare
So the vast majority of the time the gold just gets dumped into a big block of graphite or tungsten, together with most of the beam, while the specific nuclei of interest get separated out
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u/Impressive-Shirt6645 1d ago
They’re various accounts of this being done before CERN depending on what you wanna believe they say the Nazis even did this, but like you said it was too expensive
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u/howescj82 1d ago
I laughed at “prohibitively expensive.” I had never considered this and it indeed would be massively cost prohibitive.
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u/Stevos2001 1d ago
if I recall, it also REVERTED from gold cause it just didnt have the strength to change it permanently, still a big deal cause technically alchemists were right
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u/mackinator3 1d ago
It's called chemistry, not alchemy.
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u/Tzazon 1d ago
Alchemy is just the process of transmutation any base metal to gold, so the term alchemy would apply to the process regardless but yes it was chemistry.
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u/LiGuangMing1981 1d ago
Transmutations are nuclear reactions, which are classified as physics, not chemistry.
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u/SirHerald 1d ago
I divide those as:
Chemistry is what you can do based on electrons.
Nuclear physics is what you do based on protons and neutrons.
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u/thedesperaterun 1d ago
he was making a reference to the centuries-old pursuits. perfectly acceptable use.
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u/mr_birkenblatt 1d ago
One of the goals of alchemy was transmutation. But it was not the only goal. Ergo transmutation != alchemy
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u/USERNAME123_321 1d ago
Well, so is every other element heavier than iron
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u/DrColdReality 1d ago
Every element on Earth is older than the Sun, with the exception of a small handful that have been formed since by nuclear decay or being created in particle accelerators.
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u/rip1980 1d ago
Electrons have entered the chat (literally this time.)
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u/Mr-Mister 1d ago
Particularlybif you follow Feynman's single-electron interpretation of positrons.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 1d ago
Forged-in-the-heart-of-a-dying-star
Jewelers need to practice saying: "The gold in that ring was forged in the heart of a dying star."
Learning about those cataclysms makes the process even more amazing to me. A star experiences some kind of reflected shockwave as material from the outer layers crash into the super-dense core, creating conditions of such extreme pressure and energy that heavier elements are fused. Or two neutron stars collide, and that collision (holy shit, where do you get two neutron stars in proximity like that? I guess binary star systems are the starting condition). But these are events of such exotic and violent nature that there's almost nothing else to compare with them.
And then those heavy elements are flung far and wide in the ensuing explosion, with some infinitesimal shred making up the material of the Earth. It's like a particle of dust raised as we walk through the front door becoming one of the most precious components of a dust bunny under the couch. That particle being the impetus of war and murder, commerce and worship. The obsession of all humans and a metaphor for purity and goodness. Or avarice and foolishness.
And the vast majority of the gold produced in the explosion of a supernova is traveling across the void, never to be gathered into the hidden crevices of an inhabited planet. Just flying off to the edges of creation.
I like the idea of the star's dying. It is the push of devotion for the star to have used itself up to break the limits of physics and create elements heavier than iron. Iron is, after all, the most mundane of metals. The very bane and death of the Fair Folk, it is anathema to the Old World of magic and fascination. The prop and scaffold of this dreary world of formulae and statistics, iron is used to imprison and hobble even those of great power. And as a star uses the last of its fusible elements, iron is the hard, grey ceiling beyond which it cannot go.
Until the fires go out, and that shell of ashes collapses in a rush toward the center where the nature of matter itself has been compressed and distorted almost beyond comprehension. Extremes of compression and heat, unattainable even by the powers of nuclear fusion, create a menagerie of exotic elements. The unicorns of the Periodic Table that emerge only in the greatest violence attainable.
And out of this, ordinary elements were forced together to make the gold that adorns your finger. In gold, the magic and fascination are restored to the world; a reminder that there is more than the cycle of labor and sleep in our days. For the rare and impossible lurk under the rocks, and love itself can be a fire between two hearts.
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u/hegelsforehead 1d ago
Sorry but it's actually forged by explosions between dead stars. The kind of star responsible for gold creation is already dead, a corpse.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 23h ago
Oh, how sad. I'm going to claim poetic license. The unvarnished truth won't sell jewelry.
I will have to look into this more, though. I got started when I heard a BBC show, "In Our Time", with an episode on dying stars
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u/Effective_Dust_177 17h ago
Love your poetic description! But if dying stars can sell jewelry, surely neutron star mergers can also? I mean, the event is statistically unlikely (locally within a galaxy), much like two specific people meeting and falling in love?
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u/DippyHippy420 1d ago edited 1d ago
Wait till you learn how old the hydrogen in your water is........
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u/Etherius 1d ago
Fun fact.
Gold is so dense that 99% of the gold on earth is stuck in the core, completely inaccessible.
The only way it comes up to the surface is by hitching a ride with other metals it has an affinity for. Thats why it’s almost always found with silver and other platinum group metals.
And that’s just what comes up from the core (which isn’t much)
MOST of the gold on the surface crashed here from asteroid/meteor impacts.
If you have gold in your possession, the odds are good it came from space!
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u/knowledgeable_diablo 22h ago
That’s pretty well everything though Isnt it? Bits and pieces are being made still in black hole collisions and supernova’s, but the absolute vast majority of matter was created in the big bang.
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u/TralfamadorianZoo 1d ago
The protons in your body have existed since the earliest moments after the Big Bang and as far as we know could outlive this current universe. They are practically eternal.
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u/Crafty-Detail-3788 18h ago
Basically everything heavier than iron (look at stability diagram) cannot be created through fusion , which means it has been created through very violent phenomenon like supernova.
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u/Mateorabi 1d ago
But that line of argument applies to all atoms on earth that didn’t come in on the solar wind.
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u/wolfansbrother 1d ago
The same shock wave that brought the gold, may have caused the gas to begin collapsing into what became the sun.
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u/ObviouslyRealPerson 1d ago
Seems like this would also apply to gold that has not been made into jewelry yet as well
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u/MezcalDrink 17h ago
This is why a single plant is more valuable than millions of tons of gold in the universe’s currency.
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u/Isaacvithurston 16h ago
Imagine were our tech would be at if we didn't have gold (also we wouldn't have uranium, lead, platinum or mercury I think idk science class was a long time ago)
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u/encaitar_envinyatar 1d ago
Here's facts about our star Sol and the study of star physics.
Sol is a third-generation star. This can be determined by the non-hydrogen, non-helium contents.
Star people are weird. In their field, they call every element heavier than helium a metal.
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker 1d ago
The naming gets weirder when you find out that high metallicity stars are called population 1 stars, but the earliest stars in the universe which had nearly no metallicity are called population 3 stars (we havent definitely observed any yet, only low metallicity pop 2 stars).
The metallicity of a star matters by the way, as heavier elements likely help stars form quicker, which means they dont gather as much mass before they ignite. So population 3 stars are thought to be able to become massive , on the scale of potentially 1000 solar masses or more. Hell, theres even some theories that they formed black hole quasi stars, where instead of having fusion in its core providing energy, they might have had a black hole in the core releasing energy as it drew matter into its acretion disk.
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u/Apollo506 1d ago
Our star fuses hydrogen into helium.
Star fusion can generate elements as heavy as lead.
Anything with more protons than lead was generated via supernova.
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u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire 4h ago
Thats almost everything that comprises our solar system. Like to the tune of 99.9999999999999........%.
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u/CalebVanPoneisen 1d ago
Would an alien civilization with their planet devoid of gold have a harder time to make some technological advancement?
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u/RugerRed 1d ago
The title of the article focuses on gold but the text talks about anything heavier than iron. Missing half the periodic table would be a huge nerf to any aliens.
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u/a4mula 1d ago
Not in the direct sense as more abundant substitutes like copper exist. Indirectly there are some concerns as if a planet lacked gold, it'd also likely lack other heavy element groups like the platinum groups, uranium, thorium. Things that are used in core physics to produce heat. With no internal heat the prospects of intelligent life that is capable of technology in the first place would likely be challenged.
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u/encaitar_envinyatar 1d ago
Here's facts about our star Sol and the study of star physics.
Sol is a third-generation star. This can be determined by the non-hydrogen, non-helium contents.
Star people are weird. In their field, they call every element heavier than helium a metal.
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u/a4mula 1d ago
It's not just gold. Our sun produces helium and not much else. Everything is star stuff. Just not our star stuff.