BBC aturday, 7 April, 2001, 10:49 GMT 11:49 UK

Gold mystery solved

Wearing a piece of the universe on your finger If you ever wondered where gold came from, then scientists may have come up with the answer.

The Earth does not have the extremes of pressure and temperature needed to create such dense metals as gold.

Instead, a team of British and Swiss scientists says the precious metal was formed before the creation of the planet.

Their calculations have shown that the relative amounts of gold and platinum found in our Solar system, compared to other elements, confirm that they formed in star collisions.

"The material, the gold and platinum made in nuclear reactions, is thrown out into space," said one of the researchers, Dr Melvyn Davies.

'Quite incredible'

"So what happens to that material is it actually pollutes the gas around it, in the galaxy, all throughout the galaxy, so it mixes up with the gas that's already in the galaxy.

"And what happens then, is that gas will gradually cool, form little lumps, and those form new stars, and planets around those stars. But now those stars and those planets contain a little bit of gold, a little bit of platinum," he says.

Throughout human history, gold has been prized by many societies for its beauty and its resistance to rust or corrosion.

Now it seems that the gold and platinum found on Earth would have been formed billions of years in the far reaches of space.

"It's really quite incredible, people think of astronomy as being a very remote, sort of very pure science really removed from the real world," says Dr Davies.

"But if you're married and you've got a gold wedding ring, you've got something on your finger that was made in something that we've studied."

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2001

Answers

"The Earth does not have the extremes of pressure and temperature needed to create such dense metals as gold."

now, i've missed a lot of stuff, but that is the first time i've heard THAT particular bit of information. are they making stuff up as they go along to support the theory du jour? how about diamonds, lead, dinosuars - is all that up for grabs now too?

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2001