According to the relevant conclusions of some well-known geographers after surveying, the mass of the earth is about 60 trillion tons, so how much gold is stored on the earth? The answer is 4 trillion tons. What is the concept of such a large number? According to the current total population of the earth of 7 billion, all the gold is divided equally among each of us, and the average person can get about 5.5 million tons of gold.
If this gold is really divided equally among everyone,000, then gold is as cheap as cabbage in the wet market. Leaving aside the issue of gold mining, let's first talk about where gold comes from.
Looking at the past and the present, you will find many interesting explanations. In ancient China, there was a legend that the Laoshan Daoists turned stones into gold, and some alchemists believed that all the metals in the world could be smelted together to make gold. There are also many interesting explanations abroad, the famous European philosopher Aristotle once thought that gold was formed because the sun shines into the ground; scientists who discovered phosphorus, a chemical element, even believe that gold can be extracted in human urine.
Today, with the progress of human science and technology and the further exploration of the universe and the starry sky, astronomers have put forward some more reliable theories. They speculate that about 4 billion years ago, Earth suffered massive asteroid impacts that brought precious metals like gold to Earth.
But where does the gold in the universe come from? How did it come about? The most essential source of gold remains an unsolved mystery. More and more people are more inclined to be the supernova explosion in the universe to produce gold, people think so there is a certain basis, gold formation environment requires ultra-high pressure and ultra-high temperature at the same time, and these conditions can not be achieved on the earth, so people move their eyes to the celestial bodies in the universe, supernova explosion is the excellent conditions for the formation of gold.
But there are many forms of supernova explosions, and scientists have come to some conclusions after careful calculations to figure out which one can form gold. Some people believe that it is due to the collision between neutron stars, in the extremely strong high temperature and high pressure environment to forge a precious metal in the universe.
And some people think that only certain special supernovae can do it, in 1957 Margaret Kifrey. Four physicists, including Burbidge, have come up with a set of theories that explain how stars produce elements through birth and extinction, including what we call gold.
At the beginning of the Big Bang, the simplest hydrogen element was produced, as well as helium and a small amount of lithium, which are the elements that provide energy to stars and are also the raw materials for making other elements through stars. The moving stars in the universe can be imagined as a huge pressure cooker, and the inside of the pot will have a variety of elements produced in a high temperature and high pressure environment. Over time, stars age and their interior temperatures and pressures rise, leading to the creation of elements with higher atomic masses.
Metal elements such as iron will appear in some massive stars, because iron is the most stable element of the same kind, so in the star synthesis of such elements will consume a lot of energy, all stars after the synthesis of iron basically will not be through nuclear fusion to synthesize heavier atomic nuclei. As iron accumulates more and more inside the star, the star loses its central energy support, and the star quickly collapses. Until it shrinks into a point where the individual actively acts as small but extremely massive, and finally under the pull of its own gravity, it erupts outward to form an extremely dazzling supernova explosion.
Elements heavier than iron will appear in this case, and the explosion causes a large number of protons and electrons to combine to form neutrons, thus forming a neutron-rich environment, and the neutrons will constantly bombard the nucleus of the iron element, which will cause the original neutrons of the iron element to decay into protons, and the increase in protons will produce new and heavier elements, such as gold and uranium.
Moreover, the energy generated by the supernova explosion is also quite huge, and the scope of the impact is as high as 1 billion light-years away. The elements produced by the explosion will enter the interstellar dust, and when passing through the earth, they will be attracted by the gravitational force and magnetic field of the earth and eventually fall into the earth, and most likely fall to the bottom of the sea. Studies have shown that radioactive Fe-60 elements have been found in the deep-sea crust, and these elements have been identified as most likely from a supernova explosion 16 million years ago.
However, at this time, some scholars pointed out that the supernova explosion in the universe alone cannot produce so many gold elements, most likely due to the fact that two double neutron stars in the process of entanglement and merger, a part of the ability to be thrown out, resulting in an environment that can refine heavy elements, which may be the true source of various heavy elements in the universe.
The gold produced during a supernova explosion is the size of the Moon, and the gold produced by the merger of binary neutron stars is the size of Jupiter. But the chances of binary neutron stars merging are very small, basically appearing only once every 100 million years, which may be one of the reasons why gold is more precious.
But isn't there still 400 million tons of gold on Earth? Unfortunately, these figures cannot really be converted into gold reserves. Because the density of gold is relatively large, so as early as the birth of the earth, gold slowly settled into the ground, and even has sunk to the core of 6370 kilometers from the surface, and the deepest mine depth of human beings is only 13 kilometers, so human beings are currently unable to mine the gold inside the earth, and only a small part can be mined.