If one of the metals that is most important to humanity is chosen, iron should be left to the table. But if you choose one of the most popular metals, it must be gold. Why has this soft, golden, corrosion-resistant chemical element become synonymous with wealth? In addition to being a currency, gold also plays an important role in electronics, communications, aerospace and other fields, so where does gold come from?
In the 16th century, the Inca Empire, with 80,000 soldiers, was invaded by 168 Spanish soldiers, and unexpectedly, the soldiers of the Inca Empire were captured before they could understand what was going on. In order to redeem the emperor's life, they paid the Spaniards a ransom known in history — enough gold to fill a room. Is it human nature that the pursuit of gold in two countries in two completely different civilizational processes is so consistent?
Gold has no practical use, it is very "lazy", sulfuric acid and strong alkalis can not corrode it, and the air will not let it deteriorate. Gold is also very soft, almost unable to handle any instrument that has a practical effect. Its production is extremely low, and the total amount of gold mined around the world each year can easily be put in a normal bedroom, and all the gold mined in human history cannot fill a gymnasium. Yet it is precisely these reasons that make gold a natural hard currency.
In order to obtain gold, the ancients tried to "turn iron into gold" through the method of alchemy, but they all failed. Ge Hong, an ancient alchemist in China, discussed the way of alchemy in his book "Baopuzi". He was inspired by the transformation of dansha into mercury, claiming that he had also refined gold. This was the case with alchemists in ancient and modern China and abroad, who had left behind alchemy, but their descendants had never succeeded in following their methods.
From the perspective of modern theory, Ge Hong's failure is well explained: the heating of dansha into mercury only makes some changes in the number of electrons in the outermost layer of mercury atoms and sulfur atoms, and the atoms themselves have not changed, so that no new substance can be created. It wasn't until 1932 that Chadwick bombarded the boron atom with a beam of α rays, knocking out neutrons and converting the boron atom into an isotope of nitrogen, which was the first time humans unlocked their nuclear manipulation skills.
The Big Bang and star furnaces of the Big Bang Cosmology are the only extreme environments in which new matter can be created. Only in such an environment can the nuclei of different atoms combine with each other to produce new elements. The sun's core temperature can reach 15 million degrees Celsius, and in this "stellar furnace", hydrogen atoms collide with each other and may recombine into atoms with higher serial numbers, but to combine into gold, just 5 billion years is definitely not enough.
The fundamental reason the Sun can't generate gold is that the mass is too small, and a supernova furnace with a large enough mass is not enough to generate all the gold in the Milky Way. But when a star dies, it either becomes a black hole or a neutron star, and once the two neutron stars orbit and merge with each other, they throw out neutron-rich material, a phenomenon known as a "thousand new stars" in the celestial body. According to human cognition, as long as the existence of the "thousand new stars" is confirmed, it can be determined that gold can be generated from it.
In August last year, humans observed gravitational waves from neutron star mergers, and at the same time monitored the phenomenon of short gamma-ray bursts, which was the first time that humans officially confirmed the connection between neutron star mergers and gamma rays, and thousands of new stars did appear in people's field of vision. Through the analysis of the spectrum, the existence of heavy elements was confirmed, and it was also proved that the merger of neutron stars produced most of the gold in the universe.