Curiosity #13 Where does all the Gold came from?
Hey Everyone , welcome once again to my curious article series.
In ancient times, the gold was particularly valued because it was believed that gold was the "sweat of the sun". They picked up the sweat of the sun i.e gold and valued it because sun was a very important part of the culture. They used to worship the sun.
But its interesting that gold was not created in the sun.
So,Where does all the gold come from?
How does this precious metal got embedded in our plant? well it seems to answer all these questions we have to look up at those shiny stars.
Gold is a extraterrestrial metal.
Nope, It was not formed in Earth's crust instead it was cooked up in the space. And it is present on earth because of a super explosion in the space that happened billions of years ago called SUPERNOVA explosion.
Stars are mostly made up of simplest and lightest elements "hydrogen" and "helium". The tremendous amount of gravitational force triggers nuclear fusion reaction in the stars core. Because of this process the stars shine. Over billions of years the nuclear fusion reaction in the core of the star starts fusing hydrogen and helium to form heavier elements namely helium, carbon, oxygen. They fuse together too producing even heavier elements Iron and Nickel.
At this point no longer energy is released from the core because no fusion can take place because of production of heavier elements. The outer layers of the star starts collapsing into the center. And due to this sudden shrinking of the star , the star explodes forming a SUPERNOVA explosion.
Fig: Supernova Explosion
The creation of heavier elements in the supernova explosion takes place only in seconds. The shock wave of the explosion propels the debris in the interstellar space throwing the gas and dust into the space. Because of the there is formation of new stars and planets.
Earth's gold was likely delivered this way.
Billions of years later , we can now extract this precious metal by mining it which is a very expensive process and a very difficult one too. In-fact, all the gold that is mined till now by the mankind can be piled into just three Olympic sized swimming pools.
Can we Produce Gold on Earth?
Actually yes, it can be produced. The particle accelerator can mimic the complex nuclear reactions to create gold. But these machine a very very small than a star so they can only construct gold atom by atom. That means it wold almost take age of the universe to produce 1 gram of gold. Which is not a very good solution to extract gold.
I hope you liked my article. If you did please let me know below in the comments.
Other works by me.
wow! really informative post, am glad i read it, learnt something new.
follow me, i will post something interesting daily. and thanks