How are elements such as gold created and why can’t humans creat
In: Chemistry
Almost everything except hydrogen and helium are made in stars (and a lot of helium is made in stars too). Everything heavier than iron is made in supernovas, while some lighter elements are made during stars’ ordinary lifetimes.
Hydrogen was made during the hadron epoch: a time that started about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang and ended about a second later. This is the time when the universe was cooling down to the point that quarks were starting to settle into their three-color (and color-anticolor) groupings that we call protons and neutrons: the building blocks of atoms.
Helium (and a small amount of lithium) were made during primordial nucleosynthesis: a time that started about 3 minutes after the Big Bang and lasted about 17 minutes. The newborn universe was still cooling down, but was still hot and dense enough that fusion was happening everywhere, almost as though the whole universe was one gigantic star.
Humans can make gold. We’ve even turned lead into gold, using particle accelerators. But the process of making gold is so incredibly expensie that it doesn’t make economic sense: even if you sold all the gold that you made, you would not get enough money to cover the cost of making it.
Latest Answers