Naturally occurring gold is beautifully gold and quite resilient. But gold micro-crystals created by an Indian team are even more gold and even more resilient. Not even mercury or hyper-concentrated aqua regia can’t deal with it.
Synthetic made gold crystals by the chemical transport reaction in chlorine gas. Purity >99.99%
By Alchemist-hp (talk) www.pse-mendelejew.de FAL or CC BY-SA 3.0 de], from Wikimedia Commons
As far as we know, the majority of gold in the Universe is created in neutron star collisions. And that means gold is quite rare. Experts think that there are 300 000 000 000 atoms of hydrogen per every one atom of gold. And ever since our ancient ancestors first discovered gold it has been driving is mad. And not only because it is pretty. It also has some incredible properties and can be quite useful. It’s the most easily malleable metal there is, it is highly reflective to infrared, red and yellow light while absorbing blue light. It’s also a noble metal – meaning it resists corrosion and oxidation quite well.
And even though it is a noble metal some chemicals can endanger it. Most famously royal water – aqua regia - a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid. Or mercury that is used in gold mining. This is where some modern alchemy come into play. A team of chemists and engineers from the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences created a new form of gold that is better than regular gold in many comparisons. The newly created micro-crystals of gold are, for example, much more resilient. This new form is completely inert to mercury and copper. And even when a hyper-concentrated aqua regia was used the crystals still survived suggesting this new form of gold is insanely chemically stable.
Sources:
- http://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/new-form-of-labmade-gold-is-better-and-golder-than-natures-pathetic-version/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201804541
