Can protons be added to an atom to create heavier elements like gold, or are they only created in supernovae?
In: Planetary Science
Sure. It can be done, although it’s usually easier to combine two nuclei than to add protons/neutrons individually to a nucleus.
That’s how we create new elements to discover.
Some elements are *considerably* easier to make than others, so breeding elements in a nuclear reactor is limited to only specific elements/isotopes, but we can even produce some like plutonium in large amounts.
Yeah but it takes a lot of energy. What if I told you an omelette at home cost $5 and three eggs to make, but an omelette at Denny’s cost $3 and one egg to make and was the exact same. You’d go to Denny’s.
They absolutely can be–but the process is so energy-hungry that there’s no point in doing so except for research purposes. At least, for materials that can just be dug out of the ground.
Supernovae produce ridiculous temperatures and physical forces–that’s what causes the fusion. Anything that can pump enough energy into something (like a particle accelerator, for example) can do the same.
Protons are pretty hard to add to an atomic nukleus. In supernovae it is actually neutrons that are added, and then the atome decauy through beta minus decay, in the end adding a proton.
In nature this only happen in supernovae (afaik), though it is possible to do so using particle accelerators. That is how all elements heavier than uranium are created.
There is absolutely no economic reason to do this. For gold starting materials would be platinum or possibly iridium or osmium. These are about as expensive as gold itself. Add to that the energy cost of the neutron source, and that only a few atoms are created.
I seem to remember an experiment a decade of more ago, where a research facility was finally able to manipulate lead into gold. I believe the spent over $1 million to make about a penny’s worth of gold.
it’s been done by Glenn Seabord. Turned bismuth into gold.
But it’s mostly for the research, it’s far too impractical for mass production. Maybe one day, in the far future, it could be something more frequently done.
Yes! They use particle accelerators to do it. It turns out that if you smash nuclei together with enough energy (but not too much), they’ll stick together and form new elements. It is, indeed, called “transmutation,” that elusive procedure the alchemists were looking for. In fact, doing so is how they discovered some of the heavier elements that are too radioactive to exist naturally. However, outside of scientific research, there’s no good reason to do it — it costs so much to run the particle accelerators, and they make such a tiny amount, that it’s really not worth it.
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