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How to Make Gold from Mercury. For many years, alchemists searched for a method to produce gold. Recently, with the advent of nuclear technology, this process has actually become possible. Mercury is relatively easy to turn into gold, so it will be used as the starting material.
Some of the collisions would be expected to remove three protons from lead, or one proton from mercury, to produce gold. “It is relatively straightforward to convert lead, bismuth or mercury into...
It's only accessible today because of asteroid bombardment. Theoretically, it's possible to form gold by the nuclear processes of fusion, fission, and radioactive decay. It's easiest for scientists to transmute gold by bombarding the heavier element mercury and producing gold via decay.
In principle, we can therefore create gold by simply assembling 79 protons (and enough neutrons to make the nucleus stable). Or even better, we can remove one proton from mercury (which has 80) or add one proton to platinum (which has 78) in order to make gold.
Gold has a natural affinity for iron, and during the differentiation of the Earth’s layers, it selectively combined with iron to sink into the core. Most of the gold within our planet is deep within the core, inaccessible to us due to the extreme depth and heat of Earth’s core.
Precious metals produced via irradiation. Gold. Chrysopoeia, the artificial production of gold, is the traditional goal of alchemy. Such transmutation is possible in particle accelerators or nuclear reactors, although the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold.
Gold is a highly efficient conductor that can carry these tiny currents and remain free of corrosion, which is why electronics made using gold are highly reliable.
One of the supreme quests of alchemists was to transmute (transform) lead into gold. Lead (atomic number 82) and gold (atomic number 79) are defined as elements by the number of protons they possess. Changing the element requires changing the atomic (proton) number.
Explore a historically preserved gold mine in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and learn how earthquakes bring gold to the surface, in this video from NOVA: Making North America: Human.
Gold (Au) melts at a temperature of 1,064° C (1,947° F). Its relatively high density (19.3 grams per cubic centimetre) has made it amenable to recovery by placer mining and gravity concentration techniques.