How are gold and other elements created?

Question

How are elements such as gold created and why can’t humans creat

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

The simple version is that after the big bang there was hydrogen and helium. These slowly swirled through space until sufficient collected in one place, which created microgravity, and attracted more and more getting “heavier” as more matter created more gravity and attracted more hydrogen and helium.

All that hydrogen and helium squished into one place created pressure and heat as things got really crowded, and they rubbed against each other and there was a spark and the first star ignited.

The sun continued to “suck in” more hydrogen and helium, and at the core of the sun nuclear fusion took place where the heat and pressure were greatest. Hydrogen and helium were slowly transformed into heavier elements. In some cases something special had to happen for the heavier elements to form, like when a super big star explodes or two stars join together. There’s a cool table that shows this here:
[https://www.sciencealert.com/images/articles/processed/solar-system-periodic-head_1024.jpg](https://www.sciencealert.com/images/articles/processed/solar-system-periodic-head_1024.jpg)

But the simple version is that the amount of heat and pressure required to start the nuclear fission is something we can’t easily do on earth. We’ve done it on a tiny scale, but the problem is that controlling this sort of reaction is so incredibly dangerous and complicated that it’s not really do-able on earth.

So why can’t we just fire a bunch of garbage into the sun and then wait a bit and harvest gold? Because if you check the table making gold requires either a dying low mass star or two neutron stars merging. That’s not something you want happening in your solar system.

The dream is something called “cold fusion” which would allow this sort of process at room temperature, but so far nobody has managed to prove this is actually possible.

As a parting thought, every element of your body (except for the hydrogen and helium) was at one point part of a star and is hundreds of billions of years old. That’s kindof a cool thought. You are made of stars. You are worthy, you are special, you are a star. Be nice to people, because they’re also stars.