I'm going to go this way, where it looks like there is probably a gold sink.
Which would just be
in a pool like this.
I am on a quest for gold. Since
NASA's James Webb Space telescope has a microscopic layer on the mirrors
I want to know, where does gold really come from?
Now, California is known for gold. It flows through the rivers,
and is embedded in the mountains, but is this really where gold originates?
Where Does Gold Come From?
Elements of Webb
I know, I'm giving a terrible example of what panning looks like.
But at this point I had already driven all the way to the San Gabriel Mountains
only to find that it is now illegal to pan for gold because it is
is now a national monument. It would just be our luck
that we ran into Bill Schuster, who's family has own property
for a really long time in the mountains. And he really showed me to how to properly pan for gold.
The first thing you've got to know, is that you’re going to get wet.
So don't worry about getting wet.
Gold Schooled. Gold is so heavy, the ripples will catch it.
Most people are so scared that they're going to lose gold.
Believe me, it will not go out.
I already see two pieces. Two big pieces.
There you go. So gold is incredibly rare. We can take
all the gold that we've ever mined, or paned,
and stick it into three Olympic sized pools.
And the reason gold is so rare, is because it isn’t even
from Earth, it's extraterrestrial.
As it turns out, finding gold cosmic origins
is a topic of hot debate. So I needed an expert to help me understand
and luckily, Mansi was in the area.
Do you like to wear gold? Yeah, in fact I got this gold ring in India myself.
Gold is one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. In fact, if you peaked into its nucleus,
it would be filled with 197 neutrons and protons.
And until a few years ago, we had no idea
how gold was made in the Universe.
Scientists debated what energetic event could make heavy elements.
Is the power of a supernova enough? Or does it need more?
That turns out to be very difficult to synthesize
in any ordinary cosmic explosion. You need a very special explosion
that can actually synthesize heavy elements like gold by R-Process.
Now the R-Process is one of the ways to make heavy elements
like gold. It is another way to say Rapid Neutron
Capture Process and it happens in a matter of a couple of seconds.
On August 17th, 2017, when the 2 neutron
stars merged, that’s when we saw the hallmark
infrared signature for the very first time. Now this neutron star merger
was and still is a big deal. It's the only
only time scientists have witnessed and measured the R-process in action.
And up until then, it was all theoretical.
Let's begin with 2 neutron stars spiraling towards each other and then
merging to give birth to a black hole.
This is where we think we saw for the very first time the gold being synthesized.
You have an abundant supply of free neutrons. So when these neutrons
they are able to bind to each other, join together and under go rapid capture.
And this rapid capture gives you a slew
of heavy elements all the way up to gold.
What I learned is that like all heavy elements on Earth,
gold has been here since Earth was formed.
It was floating around the gas and dust that formed our sun
and all the planets that formed in our solar system.
But gold is heavy, much of what we find comes up through many veins running through the crust.
That's why we often find gold alongside rivers
and volcanoes.
But what is even more poetic, is that we are using an element,
forged in the death of stars,
to investigate the dawn of our Universe.
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