They say if you spread out all the gold ever mined from the Earth in all of history, it would only cover a football field 18 inches deep.
Now when you wrap you mind around that image, it doesn’t seem like very much, especially when you digest the fact that the solar system is literally brimming with gold but scientists can’t quite figure out where all this hard-to-make metal is being created.
The yellow-hued precious element is thought to have been first deposited here on our planet by storms of interstellar dust and asteroids billions of years ago. The majority of this gold has been discovered deep in
Earth's crust, and it's the earliest-recorded metal ever mined and used by humans, dating back to its use in ancient
Egyptian jewelry circa the year 3,000 B.C.
Although relatively scarce and difficult to unearth here on our
Big Blue Marble, gold is apparently abundant in the general universe. The intense alchemy required to make the lustrous element, with its unique recipe of 79 protons and 118 neutrons binding together in a violent act of nuclear fusion to form a single atomic nucleus, makes its widespread occurrence a puzzling affair.
Those rare actions of cosmic transformation can't account for the proliferation of gold on Earth and out in heavens. But the question of exactly where does the valuable metal originate is something that has researchers scratching their collective heads. Even a new paper published Sept. 15 in
The Astrophysical Journal, which includes the common hypothesis that it comes from collisions between neutron stars, can't support the facts of gold's major presence.
Besides epic star crashes and magneto-rotational supernovas severe enough to tear a star inside out, evidence of another golden source remains an enigma.
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