Alchemists in European history are all the rage. What is an alchemist? As the name implies, it is a magician who can make gold. Gold has been synonymous with wealth since ancient times, which makes no difference in any country or region, because gold is very rare everywhere. In many legends, when do you need to describe a mysterious country, peanuts? It is often an adjective that will not be absent. It is against this background that alchemists who claim that gold can be made from ordinary substances with special medicines naturally have a high status. However, now we know that gold cannot be extracted by human beings with some potions.

Not only can't alchemists refine gold, but even the earth where we live has no ability to produce gold. So, the question is, where does gold come from? Let's start from the beginning.

All substances in the world are made up of elementary particles.

Gold is no exception. After the birth of the universe, matter appeared in the form of the most basic elementary particles. Soon, with the expansion and cooling of the universe, elementary particles began to polymerize into atoms and molecules, spontaneously forming the earliest elements in the universe-hydrogen and helium. Later, with the condensation of gas and dust, stars began to be born, and the basic elements such as hydrogen, helium and lithium fused under the action of stars, so other more stable substances appeared.

But the fusion caused by stars can only make matter gather into iron at most, and iron is already very stable.

The number of protons in gold is as high as 79, which cannot be produced in the process of star fusion.

Since gold is not produced during the birth of stars, where does gold come from? We need an activity more intense than star gathering, that is supernova explosion. However, this is only a preliminary speculation by scientists. Although it has been widely recognized, with the development of science, scientists finally found that even a supernova explosion seems to be insufficient to aggregate the element gold. So if you want to get gold, you need more intense activities than this, only neutron star collisions. Neutron stars are the most massive objects in the universe except black holes.

The collision of two neutron stars will produce a high temperature of more than 350 billion degrees Celsius, which can produce a variety of heavy metal elements including gold.

Gold was born in such a rare and intense collision between cosmic objects, and its value can be said to be real. Since gold is produced by the collision of neutron stars, where does the gold on the earth come from? We know that the earth, like other stars, was originally formed by the aggregation of gas and dust. During the formation of the earth, some gold elements in the cosmic matter became a part of the earth, so gold naturally became a part of the earth. Later, in the long years, some asteroids containing a lot of gold were dragged by the gravity of the earth and fell to the earth, bringing more gold to the earth.

But in the early days of its birth, the earth was still composed of molten substances, and these heavy gold precipitated on the molten substances, so,

Most of the gold on the earth has entered the core and mantle, and the gold in the crust may be less than one thousandth of the total gold on the earth.

Even this one thousandth can be mined very little, so gold is very valuable. But in fact, the total amount of gold on the earth is about 5 billion tons, even in everyone's hands, there are thousands of tons. From this perspective, we are all rich people. However, if calculated according to the amount of gold that can be mined, the average person is ten or twenty grams, but in fact many of us have not reached the average level of gold in our hands.