Discussion
Scientists crack a 20-year nuclear mystery behind the creation of gold
mcswell: I'm confused. The article is about how various excited states of tin are generated. But tin is atomic number 50, platinum and gold are 78 and 79 respectively. Can someone draw a line between these?
bonzini: It's about refining theoreticals models that are used to predict nucleosynthesis of heavier elements. The researchers used indium because we can obtain the required neutron-heavy isotopes for indium but not for heavier elements such as gold or platinum. But improving the model with data from indium, they say, makes it more accurate for gold as well?Why then gold in the title? Probably just because it's shiny.
adrian_b: Platinum is also a peak of element abundance, together with its neighbor elements.So any model of how the elements have been produced must explain why the probability of making platinum and its neighbor elements, osmium, iridium and gold was higher than the probability of making other elements.The existence of other abundance peaks is easier to understand, e.g. the peaks at tin and at lead happened because these 2 metals have "magic" numbers of protons, i.e. 50 and 82, which correspond to complete nucleon layers.The peak at platinum is higher to understand, so to explain it you need accurate models.On Earth it is not obvious that the heavy platinum-group metals and gold are located on an abundance peak, because all these precious metals have gone deep inside the Earth, into its iron core, so the crust of the Earth is depleted in them, which has made them rare and precious.
holoduke: I thought the impact of Thea made heavier elements spread much more evenly towards the surface.
tcdent: And they said turning Lead into Gold was just heresy.
chasil: I am surprised that the s-process plays no role in the formation of gold.
trhway: >concentrating one gram of platinum from one ton of iron would be tremendously difficult, requiring a huge amount of energy.melting one ton of iron requires 500KWh, 12 gallons of gasoline, less than $100 on Earth. Or 5 Tesla car batteries fully charged by say 30x30 m solar array in 5 hours - cost nothing in space once you got the hardware there. This is why mining in space is going to be a pretty big thing once/if we get cheap launch capability.
