Question: how does gold form????
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Yes, gold did come from the stars originally but things get complicated on Earth.
If you’re lucky enough to stumble across a gold nugget, it isn’t just gold in that nugget even though it will look yellow. Gold in nature is in a gold silver alloy. An alloy is where two metals are blended together in a solid. The amount of silver in gold varies so part of the mining process not just includes grabbing the gold particles from the gold ore but also purifying them.
These days, gold is found in rock deep underground in rock. And it’s not even that big. Often it’s microscopic in size and you only know it’s there because a sample of the rock in the area has been analysed to show that there’s gold present.
And just to really complicate things some minerals also contain gold because even though it is not all that reactive to oxygen and water can react with other things making it really complicated to mine for gold. One of the most important reactions that gold is part of is that it reacts with cyanide and dissolves in solution. This is how most mining companies extract gold from the ore after crushing.
And from there, the solution gets sent off to another part of the plant where gold is collected from the solution using activated carbon, (specialised form of charcoal). The activated carbon soaks up all the gold. The next stage is then washing the gold from the carbon into another solution which then has steel wool placed in it and electricity is passed through the steel wool attracting gold metals to form on it from the solution.
There is an enormous amount of work and clever use of chemistry to get gold out of the ground into the sparkly yellow stuff people wear.
The universe, when it started out, had only hydrogen and helium in it. Stars formed, lived, and exploded. During that process they made the heavier elements – all the stuff we’re made of. So we are stardust. All the atoms have come from that.
Mind = blown.
So gold, like everything else, is made from atoms fusing together in stars – the heavier ones are formed towards the end of the stars life.
Outside of stars, elements pretty much stay as they are. Our lives are governed by chemistry on the earth. Chemistry involves the electrons around the nucleus, not the nucleus itself. Nuclear events happen on the earth only in nuclear reactors, bombs and high-energy physics experiments like the ones going on at the Large Hadron Collider (as well as natural background decay of some things that are very large and naturally radioactive).
So gold formed off the earth, but is now part of it. It sticks around because it doesn’t react with things on the earth like water and oxygen. Though we are now starting to use it for a bunch of pretty surprising chemical reactions in the lab. A gold atom will always stay as a gold atom unless we force it to accept some other subatomic particles under extreme conditions (by blasting it in a nuclear reactor or something).
So the answer is “it comes from stars”.
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Matt is right: gold atoms were made when the universe was formed. Some metals can combine with other elements to form different minerals. for example, iron is usually found in the form of iron oxide (iron ore). Gold is very unreactive, so it is usually found as bits of pure gold embedded in something else.
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Keiran and Mat have explained how gold forms so I’m going to tell you a joke about it.
First I have to explain something (it’s less uncool if I have to explain before the joke rather than after).
All the elements on the periodic table have a chemical symbol, an abbreviation of their name which makes them quicker to write out. eg. the symbol for Hydrogen is H.
The symbol for gold is Au. This is because it is based on its Latin name, Aurum.
The chemical symbol for copper is Cu. This is based on the Latin name, Cuprous.
So here’s the joke:
Gold walks into a bar and Copper says “Au!”. They sit down and have a few drinks together then Copper needs to leave. As Copper walks out of the bar Gold says “Cu!”
Hilarious right?
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