Gold is a fission product. It is not formed directly from r-process. It's a fragment resulting from the fission of heavier elements. Its abundance patterns are explained by the tendency of fission products to cleave into particular nuclides and decay into stable isotopes.

You said "We were wrong about origin of gold" but you told the things we already knew. don't do clickbaits and stupid titles if you're talking about science.

Sad clickbait. You lay it out as if some new discoveries were made, which would prove that ... "We Were Wrong About Gold's Origin" CLICKBAIT. EDIT: The video is really good, am really enjoying it, but the title suggest a DIFFERENT VIDEO. Don't bait your audience. It makes the audience feel taken for fools. Audience does not enjoy that

In the Inca civilization bit, your image of Inti is an Ecuadorian mask a thousand years older than the Incas (who conquered Ecuador just some decades before the Spanish came). I don't blame you though or the guy who made that animation for that TED talk, basically nearly all modern images about the Incas usually have errors, especially about their gods, of which they didn't made much iconography other than abstract stones and the like so we usually use the far more abundantly pre-Inca iconography to fill the gaps.

Q: So just how much gold did they make? A: None of your bismuth.

Another explanation. Gold (and other heavy elements) aren't as common as our local environment would suggest. And that Earth just so happened to be born in proximity of a previous neutron star collision.

"...and probably most importantly, it's shiny..." This. This right here. Had me right in the feels.

Dear Dr. Ben, temperatures don’t begin to raise. Raise is a transitive verb and requires an object. However, temperatures begin to rise is correct, because rise is an intransitive verb and doesn’t require an object.

The price of gold isn't skyrocketing. The value of the dollar is plummeting:( I just wanted to add that this video on gold's origin was fantastic. All the thousands of years gold is the standard and we still don't know where it comes from. It's to bad it is not conclusive. But I think we have a good educated guess. Thanks.

We were never completely wrong, it's just that there are still chapters to add to how all of everything is created. We know that anything heavier than iron is essentially made in events that have more energy than those that are present in a stars normal stages of their existence... more or less.

Who was wrong? As a primary and secondary student in the 1960s and living near the Johnson Spacecraft Center this is the same origin of metals that we were told in school.

One of the things I love so much about real science is that it is a model, and as such will change with new information. There's nothing wrong with revisiting old ideas and asking new questions.

One tiny point of criticism; Dr Ben uses the term 'theory' a bit frivolously. I would prefer the term 'hypothesis', since the term 'theory' is misunderstood by so many people.

Interesting vid, thanks. On a semi-related note, I feel in addition to the reasons you listed for Au being so popular, there are a couple of more reasons: 1. It doesn't corrode or dissolve easily, meaning you never lose any of your investment even as you remelt and recast it, and is found in its natural form and needs no further refinement, 2. Its density allows for easily separation and concentration and more importantly, 2. It is just the right amount of rare. Uncommon enough to be sought after, while not being so rare as to be unobtainable. If it were as common as copper, it would lose all its value. If it were as rare as platinum, it would be yet another exotic metal.

Frequency Over Time and Elemental Formation In this model, we consider that elements start from hydrogen (the simplest element) and evolve over time, increasing in informational density and decreasing in frequency as they form heavier elements. Here's a detailed explanation: 1. Hydrogen as the Starting Point: - High Frequency, Low Information Density: Hydrogen, being the simplest element, represents the highest frequency and the lowest informational density. It is the first and most abundant element formed in the early universe through Big Bang nucleosynthesis. 2. Stellar Nucleosynthesis: - Formation of Heavier Elements: Stars fuse hydrogen into helium and, through subsequent fusion processes (helium burning, carbon burning, etc.), produce elements up to iron (Fe). These processes occur under extremely high temperatures and pressures within stellar cores. - Increasing Information Density: As elements form through fusion, their informational density increases. Iron represents a significant milestone, where fusion processes no longer release energy. 3. Transition to Lower Frequency, Higher Information Density: - Beyond Iron: Elements heavier than iron are not formed in significant quantities in regular stellar nucleosynthesis due to the lack of energy gain. Instead, these elements require environments with high neutron fluxes, such as supernovae and neutron star mergers. - Neutron Star Contributions: Neutron stars, with their extreme conditions, provide the necessary environments for the rapid neutron capture process (r-process), which forms heavy elements like gold, platinum, and uranium. Over time, these processes increase the informational density of the elements formed. 4. Elemental Evolution Over Time: - Temporal Development: The development of elements can be seen as a temporal progression from high frequency (early universe, simple elements) to low frequency (later stages, complex elements). - Lower Energy Requirements: As elements become more informationally dense, they require less extreme conditions for their formation compared to the high temperatures needed for initial fusion processes in stars. This supports the idea that neutron stars and other late-stage astrophysical phenomena play a crucial role in forming the heaviest elements. Visualising the Process - Spiral Model: Visualising this as a spiral, with hydrogen at the centre (high frequency, low information) and heavier elements at the outer edges (low frequency, high information), helps illustrate the progression and increasing complexity over time. - Temporal Axis: Adding a temporal axis to this model shows how elemental formation evolves from the early universe to present day, with increasing informational density corresponding to the age of the universe and the processes involved. Summary By considering frequency as developing over time, we see a coherent picture of elemental formation: - Early Universe: High-frequency, low-information elements like hydrogen dominate. - Stellar Nucleosynthesis: Stars create elements up to iron, increasing informational density through high-energy fusion processes. - Astrophysical Events: Supernovae and neutron star mergers further increase informational density by forming heavy elements under extreme conditions, which require less extreme temperatures due to their higher informational content. This model underscores the role of time and evolving conditions in the universe, supporting the idea that heavy elements develop through a combination of stellar and astrophysical processes.

5:20. hydrogen usually doesn't get used up. Smaller the star = sooner it explodes and blows unfused hydrogen to the wind.

Video Start: Gold is the flesh of RA. Video End: Gold is the body of exploding stars. Humorously, this video goes full circle. Stated another way, "the body of exploding stars" = "the flesh Ra" the Egyptian sun god.

In my youth, I wondered where Solid Gold Dancers came from.

Gold is to protect earth from radiation and diamond from inner core ,oil for moving of rocks plates underground but not sure about this one

There are really two separate questions here: 1. How do we explain the amount of gold in the universe as a whole? 2. How do we explain the amount of gold we see in our human environment? Most of the video is about the first question, yet the second is also important to understand. It is very important to realize that what we see on the surface of the earth is mit necessarily representative of the universe at large. The bigest example is how Helium is the second most common element in the universe, but very rare on the earth's surface. Other elements are common on earth, but almost never found in pure form because they readily react with other atoms to form stable chemical componds. The fact that gold is not very reactive with other chemicals, but binds together with itself is one of the reasons pure, or nearly pure, gold can be "easily" found on earth. By "easily found" I mean when it is present it is easily identified and extractable. Also gold once isolated can remain so for centuries, unlike iron or copper that easily oxidize into "nonmetallic" forms.

What if heavy element distribution isn't completely uniform and we were lucky to form in an area where one can get at more of it than typical?

Heavy elements are created by: 1. R-process: Ultra-rapid neutron absorption without sufficient time for decay between neutron impacts. 2. S-process: Repeated absorption of neutrons with time between impacts for some decays to occur. 3. F-process: While energy cannot be liberated from fusion of iron and more massive elements, such fusions can and do occur. Thermodynamics favors such endothermic fusions at sufficiently high temperatures. Such fusions can cool the core of a star, accelerating collapse. Such fusions produce high mass nuclei which quickly decay into more ordinary elements. 4. I-process: Inverse fission caused when heavy nuclei collide (as in F-process) in the presence of very high neutron fluxes during supernova explosions. This process is approximately the reverse of ordinary nuclear fission. 5. N-process: when outer layers of tentative neutronium are bounced off of cores in supernovae, and are ejected from the stars, then spall into ultra-massive nuclei that quickly decay into more stable ordinary nuclei. Not all of the above processes are distinct, but rather grade into one another. Furthermore, the initial rarity of the heavy but relatively non-reactive elements is exacerbated by the process of the formation of the Earth's core. These elements do not readily form oxides, but remain in elemental form. As such, they are soluble in the molten iron that makes up most of the Earth's core. They were therefore dissolved out of the original molten mass of metal and rock and descended to Earth's core. More reactive metals, like lead, for instance, DO readily form oxides. Hence, although lead's cosmic abundance is far lower than that of gold, it is far more common in the crust where oxides prevail.

As the universe expands , stars are further and further apart so less likely to merge.

It’s sad how many people get sucked into science Fiction and never leave.

The king Midas example about mythology surrounding gold isn't the best, it's more a moral story about greed ending with tragedy.

Gold prices going up means that interest rates are lagging inflation. This began to be more apparent when interest rates fell below 6% after a high of 18%, 20 years before. Gold prices advance on the financial crises that arose out of financial excesses where private money creation elevated asset prices. Gold in a purified form is still money, though it’s used as a store of value.

only youtube would casually recommend me some Serj Tankian explaining me the origins of gold

Fine job of explaining why the age of the universe is wrong and that there was no initial big bang event.

Good show, but one mistake. Earth's crust is about 1.6 ppb (parts per billion!). 1.6 ppm is ore grade in some mines.

As a relative layperson (biology rather than physics) I really admire your science communication skill here, both keeping it simple enough but also detailed enough to represent reality very well. You're actually so good at communication that at first I starting thinking "Oh no, another astrophysics video that skips along the deep well of truth and evidence like a stone, happily referencing anything that can get clicks or serve biases", but I was very very happily surprised to see your descriptions match all the underlying science that I've seen elsewhere in being an amateur. Very impressed with your description of recent research in this area. I wish more people knew about interferometry, LiGo, etc.. as it's one of the best ways to show how indirect measurements can reveal so much happening so far away.

Fun fact: There's an asteroid in the solar system named "Pysche 16" and it is made entirely out of gold, and some other heavier elements.

I like the idea that gold is sun sweat.

Gold is sky rocketing in price because we are familiar with the origin of regular currency notes.

They figured out transmutation at the FED, they make gold out of thin air!

Maybe you know or another commenter does, but I always wondered about iron-burning in stellar cores. We all know the standard explanation you repeated here, but my question is more specific. Does the star actually start fusing iron and, very rapidly, it poisons the process because it is endothermic instead of exothermic, thus near instantly taking up all the energy in the core as it begins to happen leading to collapse? Or does it just not happen period? The latter tends to be what seems hinted at by the traditional explanation, but I know enough to realize that in a lot of cases that is just the ASSUMPTION based on learning that same basic explanation, not that they actually know. So still trying to figure that out. There has to be a paper somewhere that describes what is modeled to happen in a core going supernova instant by instant, right?

It seems the title should be "we are still not sure where gold comes from" after millennia of study.

In a Post-Apocalyptic Survival Scenario you need to Understand that if I have Food and You Have Gold then I Have Everything and you Have Nothing.

The average concentration of Au in the crust is much less than 1.6ppm, which is a level of the ore in some gold mines. It's more like 0.001 to 0.006 ppm, 1 - 6 ppb, parts per billion.

The Egyptians were the closest to getting it right. In a way, gold does come from the sun. Or should I say stars. Is it possible that we are simply not equip enough to observe the Universe? I once herd that NASA budget for stargazing was only capable to covering around 3% of our sky. If that is true, then it is possible that it could be happening in the other 97%.

Problem is, the big bang never happened.

At 3:12 I think you meant to say 1.6 parts per billion (ppb). 1.6 ppm is low grade ore. What is still amazing about that though is you can take a sample from almost anywhere and it will have a measurable amount of gold in it even though it is an ultra low concentration. Even seawater contains gold.

It turns out that not all neutron star mergers are the same.

1990 - "This gold is very likely produced in a super novae" 2024 - "This gold is very likely produced in a collision of neutron stars" 2030-.....

When the video takes a humble view of how we got the elements...that's gold!

The kilonova hypothesis is billowing for years, although everything point in the direction, there is no known mechanism to create heavy elements like gold and even uranium and transuranic elements - simply from neutrons. Decay of a free neutron into a proton, an electron and and an antielectron-neutrino takes about a quarter hours. During a binary collision, there is simply not enough time to form enough protons. The heavier the elements to synthesize are, the more energy is required, since Coulomb's laws says, force increases with the product of atomic number. And energy is to integral of force along a distance.Therefore, I suspect, transmutation of heavy elements might occur during the early stage of a supernova. The Chandrasekhar limit may or may not play a crucial role. Giant stars are also no viable candidates, since they are used to collapse into a black hole in a quite unbureaucratic manner. Anton Petrov has already made videos about suddenly disappearing stars.

The problem is see is by 4:38 you’ve already broken the first two laws of thermodynamics. I thought gold is created by supernova was common science knowledge. The reason it’s “rare” is because it’s created at a specific pressure and temp and the star collapsing is only at that pressure and temp for millisecond before it starts making the next element.

also one thing that needs to be mentioned is that with expending of the space time passes by slower, all this could be happen in seconds, measured our time period that is now present. this means billions of years happened only in seconds because the space was relative small.

This reminds me the story of “innunaki” how rare this element is, that they had to come to earth to get it to protect their homeworld by suspending gold particles in air since their atmosphere was depleted. Pretty convincing after watching this video. How rare gold actually is, in terms of the universe.

0:49 it comes from the same place all the other elements heavier than iron come from supernovas and the fact that it is here indicates that our star is at least the second star to exist in this location because iron is a Starkiller and it cannot be fused to make heavier elements from Stellar Fusion

We could call this the “Stepping Stone Theory of Noonereallyknows”

I heard gold was made during the collision of stars, just like all elements up to iron are made in stars and heavier elements are made during supernovae.

Why are they looking for one "Singular" event to explain gold's existence? Why couldn't there be multiple sources?

On January 6th 1970 the price of Gold was $35.70

I seem to recall in an issue of popular science about 15 years ago where scientists figured out a method to breed bacteria that poop out gold. It was still ridiculously expensive to produce, but far better than atomic transmutation in particle accelerators.

(12:30) The recent price of gold isn't "skyrocketing". The value of intrinsically worthless fiat currencies used to describe the price of gold is cratering.

I spent a happy day panning for gold once in Scotland, and came back with some recognisable flakes and micro-nuggets - its a fun way to waste a day, and I recommend it!

Imagine: Somewhere in a solar system a little over 5 bln lys away, someone is watching our area of space because of the Gamma Ray Burst that would produce all the heavy elements we use today.

The value of gold does not increase or decrease. The value of the monetary scrip you use to buy gold with increases or decreases in value.

perhaps high frequency static of the right frequency, epseically when another material follows a different frequency. essentially this method can bypass some of the common forces keeping atoms apart atleast for a bit. as it can essentially allow materials to kind of just ignore eachother and move through eachother as if they are not there or even let light pass through it. the main factor is that the speciffic frequency static is one of the well tuned frequencies for that speciffic material in those speciffic circumstances where even a planets own resonance might have a effect on it(as this is a part of science where people have found results but do not fully understand the working yet so most results where different from expected and where essentially reckless experiments). essentially the atoms and particles they are made up of start to resonate and kind of synchronize. their movement and spin becomes more synced. when another material at a aproapriate other similar synchronisation level moveses through (but not exactly synchronized in the same way, well the same way can work but needs a phase offset optimally in multiple dimensions). then those materials can in cases move through eachother as if the other does not exist. light is also a fun exception to this, as light doesn't really need to be synchronized for this to be possible for it, since light actually already kind of is way more synchronized than normal atoms, while light comes from all directions, it's paths tend to be more direct and straight. however the basics is that using static(high voltage low amperage) at the right frequency you can cause atoms to kind of ignore eachothers fields and can actually accidentally reach a lot of effects which are normally generated using particle accelerators(note that this is very dangerous since you do not know what you get, and do not know what you are doing, I learned the soft way by having my home lab kind of explode/fry itself using a small glowing orb it accidentally created for a while before it imploded/exploded at insanely high speed and pitch with a strong electric feeling which could be both heard and felt in the entire neighbourhood despite it being of such a high frequency, didn't destroy much other than electronics and such however, I guess the speed was so high that most normal mass didn't really have time to react to it, explosions are kind of like a swing, there is a range of frequencies at which materials are effected a lot, to low frequency and it won't do much, to high frequency and it won't do much either until it reaches one of those ranges where things evaporate and such).. which really is the light way since the hard way would be much worse)

Except for a very thin vernier of normal matter, mostly light elements, neutron stars are almost completely made of neutrons produced by the combination of protons and electrons in the core collapse supernovae that form them. Structural theory of the cores of neutron stars speculates that their cores are made of exotic high energy particles made of combinations of quarks, or even just free quarks which may be stable under such high energy conditions. So, where do the heavy nuclei come from in a binary neutron star collision to experience neutron capture and become gold, platinum, silver, etc? There would certainly be plenty of high energy neutrons in such a binary collision, but you cannot build a heavy element like gold by bombarding hydrogen, carbon or oxygen with neutrons.

Luckily Goldfinger didn’t want to implode the Sun to make gold.

3:25 The "Olympic swimming pool" is _not_ an S.I. unit of measure! 😁

I really wanna know if we can manipulate a bose einstein condensate to change the properties of the atoms once it collapses, from whatever it was before to another element in some way

11:04 How do we know gold is 'abundant' everywhere... and not just our local star cluster? Perhaps we have gold cause a large number of neutron stars collided 8 billion years ago near where Earth formed

Gold can be created via LENR processes. It has been found in samples of materials involved with LENR experiments using a SEM. You simply add more protons to an atom until you have 79. There are processes in nature that can do these low energy nuclear reactions such as cavitation.

I would have to think that the chances of only 7 years giving any statistical evidence that is convincing would be on the low end of the low end of possibilities. I doubt even 10,000 years (impossible probably) would give us the needed time to come to a statistically relevant conclusion.

✨Because the world realize tons of money are being created every day by the powerful while Gold cannot be created. Gold has value & is limited in quantity so it's skyrocketing👑🥇🏆🤴🏼

Why not smash plutonium into itself to create extra dense elements that decay into gold and other materials?

skip to 10 mins to get ur answer

Dying stars produce gold. There has to be a gold asteroid somewhere in the universe travelling through space.

$11.6 trillion is the sum worth of all gold mined in the world and it would only cover less than one third of the US debt which is soon to be $35 trillion. That’s a reality check!

Its quite possible colisions of Neutron stars just dont occure frequently enough to explain the amount of Gold we find on Earth, and gold has been around a lot longer than our present universe.

if there was a way to transmute into gold we would not be hearing about it at all

So part 1 mystery is How is Au formed. Part 2 is as heavy elements sink to a bottom or inside the formation of a planet is it by volcanic or plate tectonics that pushes it to the surface ? Why then does it seem to aggregate in specific physiological locations or nuggets ?

How does capturing a neutron enable an element to change in the Periodic table and "climb up the element ladder"? Is there a neutron to proton reaction occurring here?

Jerry Seinfeld transmuted a good amount of gold from his jokes: "That's gold, Jerry! Gold!" - Kenny Bania

It grinds my gears when someone calls alchemy "the pursuit of turning lead into gold"... For 3 reasons 1 of them, that it's essentially like describing physics as "the pursuit of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics"

Who else thinks that gold bar is fake ?

I remember when I was a kid I stuck my mum’s gold ring on to the TV screen that was on 24/7 in my mums front shop. Forgot about it and then years later found it, and it turned into what felt like lead

I heard there was an old bearded white guy in the clouds that created gold out of nothing. Makes sense to me.

If that gold bar he's holding is real it's got to be at least 10 ounces.

TL:DR The Egyptians were right, Gold is the remnants of the body of RA, the Sun God; / Or more scientifically but less poetically, Gold is Steller Material

Or maybe black holes were in the universe since the start so galaxies formed pretty much from the start, which means they are older so there was more time for the gold to accumulate. Also maybe in young universe collisions of black holes were more common and produced some heavy elements.

There should also be enough heavier elements around, that part of gold's abundance could be attributed to it being a decay product as well. The question would be to what percentage.

Do silver next

“Hey, we’re on campus, where’d you get that slightly radioactive gold?!” “That’s none of your Bismuth!” -a Nuclear Chemist

Strange that the gold in the surface did not sink much deeper due to its density.

It’s crazy how the ancients believed gold came from there sun god and/or the sweat of the sun god. And if you Google how gold was created, it says it was made in the combustion of stars and explosions of large stars called supernovae… Aka our sun

Maybe the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that the universe is young, and WE are the Elder Gods

Look no further than our nearest star. A recurring micro novae could be a much better hypothesis. The gold found through placer mining in Alaska looks like it was simply splattered in a cataclysmic event. Australia also has these splatter nuggets and they are very much layer dependent. Any other novae would be just to far away or to far back in time to explain what the miners are finding.

A metallurgist once told me that every metal when finely powdered is black, except gold, which keeps it's color.

If high neutron flux transmutes lighter elements material in surroundings of the neutron stars merger, then relative abundance pattern should be repeated on the list of elements sorted according to the atomic mass above Iron, because those atoms would be mostly transmuted "seed" (light) elements. Of course, that pattern should be corrected for subsequent radioactive decay of heaviest elements. That is an interesting question to investigate. I am more interested in something different: fusion of elements heavier than iron is not energetically favorable, but it doesn't prevent those reactions from occurring along energetically favorable fusion processes which can provide needed energy. Not all material is fused at once and not all products are immediately dispersed, so we can have different reactions going on concurrently. Also, during gravitational contraction, after no energetically favorable reactions can ensue, the contraction itself will convert gravitational potential energy into heat which could partially be used in energetically unfavorable fusion reactions.

but we are not on a star and we find gold in chunks, not just few molecules from stardust...

I think it was electricaly made, a massive electrical discharge of lightning hitting the ground and turning whatever it was into gold, it's always near quartz.

I recently read that all the gold ever extracted on Earth would only form a cube 71 feet wide. Also that 30% of all the gold extracted, had occurred since 1950.

Nobody's ever seen a star form... that's speculation at best

this video is longer than it needs to be. says we were wrong. then says we dont really know. im still set on my thoughts on the process.

It all comes down to the simple question, how long ago and what mass was the star's that made up the cloud that eventually formed our solar system. If we look at Uranium as an example, we have to go back some 2 billion years ago since the ratio of U-235 was high enough to result in a nuclear reaction resulting in the one or handful of traces of trace elements from that such as natural plutonium.

It makes sense that, as the universe ages, neutron star mergers get rarer. New stars are certainly being born but, as the supply of hydrogen decreases, so the rate of star formation decreases and so also the rate of neutron stars being born. Then, you need a binary system where both stars are large enough to become neutron stars instead of white dwarfs but not so large they go supernova.

The Hertz castle has a pool that has gold in lots of places. He was rich and happen to die! Now The hertz castle is made into a museum contraption.