We Were Wrong About Gold's Origin

of all of the elements that have fascinated the human race this gold has been the center of attention for much of our civilized history it's both surprisingly common and simultaneously very rare to find durable yet maleable it resists corrosion and is highly conductive and probably most importantly it's shiny but the most surprising thing about it is that data collected over the last few years proves that we still can't explain where it actually comes from the precious metal soaring to a new record high today record high record high again multiple record highs this year he who has the goal makes the rues he where the goal makes the rules across many ancient cultures gold the Sun and divine creation were inseparable Concepts the ancient Egyptians believed that gold was an indestructible metal derived from the Flesh of the Gods particularly raw the sun god the Incan civilization believed gold came from the sweat of their son God inti in Greek mythology the legend of King Midas who could turn anything he touched into gold fascinated and concerned us the Mastery of this element symbolized both the creation of Limitless wealth and the potential for corruption and destruction this didn't stop a multi-century long Pursuit though from ancient Greek to 19th century Alchemist to even Isaac Newton himself to find the origin of the Philosopher's Stone a legendary substance believed to have the ability to transform base metals like lead into gold or silver and even the power to Grant immortality through the elixir of life history isn't without a sense of irony after almost a millennia long pursuit of trying to find gold interest in transmutation ebed and Faded just a 100 years later though we finally worked out how to do it in 1970 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California nuclear chemist which is a funny way of saying physicists Glenn seaborg and Walt Loveland used a linear particle accelerator to bombard bisou nuclei with very high energy carbon and neon atoms to knock protons and neutrons off of the Bismuth nuclei for the first time in history successfully transmuting an element into gold before we get excited here the amount of gold produced was minuscule barely more than a few atoms the process of nuclear transmutation into gold is turns out was just highly inefficient and also expensive seaborg estimated that it would cost1 quadrillion doar to make 1 ounce of gold through this method more money than has ever existed at that time an ounce of gold was worth about $560 meaning this would be a negative 9999999999999 44 return on investment gold remains both incredibly difficult to produce but also strangely abundant the Earth's crust alone contains 1.6 parts per million of gold given the Earth's crust has a mass of about 2.2 * 10 19 metric tons this implies that there are about 35 million metric tons of gold in the Earth's crust alone as a species we've extracted around 200,000 metric tons of gold roughly equivalent to just over four olympic size swimming pools full of gold which would be worth around 11 6 trillion so if it's so hard to produce why do we have so much of it and where does it all come from well it turns out that our ancestors association with gold and the sun was actually a really good starting point the Roaring Inferno at the center of a star when you start a new universe your initial resources are limited after a big bang and a period of cooling protons neutrons and electrons start to aggregate to form our universe's simplest and lightest elements hydrogen and helium and sometimes a trace amount of lithium and brillium to start to produce more interesting elements you need to wait for the force of gravity to bring together clouds of these gases and begin to tightly squeeze them if the mass of these clouds is large enough and so capable of producing sufficient inward gravitational force and pressure the elements at the center of this ball of gas are forced closer and closer together and their temperatures begin to raise until the lightest of these elements hydrogen nuclei are bouncing back and forth against their neighboring hydrogen nuclei with such speed that they overcome the electrostatic force that keeps like charges apart and get so close that the strong force snaps them together to form helium this turns the hot cloud of gas into a star this process Fusion specifically a type of fusion called hydrogen burning produces sufficient energy and heat to resist the inward crushing force of further gravitational collapse of the star but this only lasts while the star has sufficient hydrogen to power it now this may be several hundreds of millions of years but once the hydrogen Supply is exhausted with no Fusion to provide an outward Force the internal pressure reduces and the star again begins to collapse until it presses so tightly ignites the next fusion process helium burning converting the helium Supply into carbon and heavier nuclei this cycle continues from Helium to carbon burning to oxygen to silicon and finally to ion but then once a significant amount of iron has built up in the core the process stops as it is not energetically favorable to fuse ion nuclei together but at this point in time through this process called Stellar nucleo synthesis we have only produced half of our periodic table so that can't be the end of our story as the Fusion fuel runs out in the core of a star the star no longer has a way to counterbalance gravity and it collapses in a fraction of a second this core collapse triggers a shock wave that propagates outward that event is so violent that the outer layers rebound off of the core in a massive explosion a type 2 Supernova from this explosion one of the most violent events in the universe we get two things number one we get some further nucleosynthesis of heavier elements than iron nickel Cobalt copper zinc even some gold platinum and uranium but when we look closely at these events even though the pressure and temperatures are immense during a supernova these conditions only last for a very short time before the matter is flung apart Across the Universe and ultimately these are very low efficiency processes meaning they don't produce enough material to explain the level of abundance of gold in our universe it turns out that depending on the mass of the star before the Supernova we are also left with item two either a black hole or more useful in our Midas likee Pursuit a neutron star an object with approximately 1.4 to2 time the mass of our sun compressed into an object with a radi of about 10 to 15 km this gives them incredibly High densities around 10 to the 18 kg per cubic meter meaning a sugar cube sized amount of neutron star material which would have a mass of about a billion tons that's roughly equivalent to the weight of K2 the second highest mountain in the world but how does that get us to our goal of producing gold now here I think it would be totally reasonable if you're expecting me to say similar to Star formation creating heavier elements in their core in this new ultra dense neutron star The increased density should enable good further element formation but it turns out that isn't what happens what we must wait for is two of these Neutron starss to be in approximately the same place at the same time and form a binary star system where the neutron stars orbit trapped in each other's gravitational pole for Millions to hundreds of millions of years Orting so violently they send ripples in SpaceTime out Across the Universe until ultimately they Collide a neutron star merger event usually called a killer Nova and the cataclysmic energy that they release facilitates rapid Neutron capture of nearby elements it was these merger events that scientists believe was leading to the creation of heavier elements such as gold platinum and other Rare Earth elements these materials then enrich the surrounding interstellar medium as they are scattered out Across the Universe these scattering events glow in their aftermath of the event through radioactive decay and thermal heating and in addition to to the gravitational waves it is this thermal signature that we can detect on Earth our conviction that these relatively rare kiler NOA events accounted for somewhere between 80 to 100% of gold formation in our universe felt theoretically sound but it wasn't until 2017 that we had the opportunity to see one in action on August 17th 2017 the ligo and Virgo gravitational wave detectors picked up signal gw170817 followed almost immediately by a short period gamma ray burst the at 2017 gfo killer Nova event as the two neutron stars collided they emitted a massive cloud of heavy Elements by fitting The observed light curves and Spectra from these events scientists estimated that the total mass of the ejector was found to be around 5 to 10% of the mass of our sun estimation of the gold Mass based on the total ejector mass and the predicted fractions of heavy elements produced a gold mass of around 10 times the mass of the Earth at the time this event appeared to solve the mystery it seemed that the vast majority of gold as well as other heavy elements were primarily produced in neutron star merger events there's a famous video from around the news released where a research team member says the gold in this watch was very likely produced in the Collision of two neutron stars however as they often is with physics there was a catch as we have continued to observe the universe over the past 7 years since the 2017 event discrepancies have begun to emerge as of today despite several years of additional observation time and detection of many other gravitational merger events most of them black hole black hole mergers only one other binary neutron star merger event has been observed which following this rarity extrapolated out to the rest of the universe would mean these events weren't common enough enough to explain Gold's abundance the other slightly damning piece of evidence here was that the one other neutron star merger event that we did observe did not produce any heavy elements just when we thought we had finally found Gold's origin it seems again that we were back to the drawing board there are of course several possible solutions to explain the discrepancies in our observations maybe the frequency of neutron star merger events is evolved and it was more common in the past explaining why the universe previously was so good at generating gold or perhaps is that the most energetic type 2 supernova create more heavy elements than we previously calculated or observed or maybe during the latter stages of a star's life a slow Neutron capture process allows elements to advance up the periodic table to produce those heavier elements we see today regardless of the explanation each of these theories has their own flaws that don't quite match current theory or current observations it may be that the 2017 event was just incredibly rare and we were very lucky to see it or it might be the reverse that we've been unusually unlucky in the last s years not to see another one the science of uncertainty here is difficult to understand which way we are biasing ourselves what it leaves us with is another step in the story written by Humanity over thousands of years to understand where this mystical rare but AB element actually comes from at worse maybe this is an explanation why the recent price of gold is skyrocketing if you like this video you might be interested in the Breakthrough that led us to understand how the force that holds these neutrons and protons together to actually form gold inside an atom actually works check it out here as always thank you very much for watching I'll see you guys next week goodbye [Music]

Channel: Dr Ben Miles

Views: 649,509

Keywords: science, future, breakthrough

Id: fX7Uzgv8yPU

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2024