Gold has a magical power on people. People have always dreamed of finding huge, undiscovered gold deposits. This led to a Gold Rush in the 19th century in the United States. However, the real El Dorado may not be on earth, but in the center of our solar system.
Every school-going child knows that the sun consists largely of hydrogen. It is the lightest and most common element in the universe that fuses into helium inside stars. This in turn creates a lot of energy that gives the sun its golden glow in the form of radiation from the Earth’s perspective.
The lesser-known fact is that many other elements that can be found on Earth also sleep in the belly of our home star. Our sun is therefore considered a metal-rich star. Precious metals such as gold are also part of this huge fireball. Which naturally raises the question: How much gold is there in the sun?
Researchers have already addressed this question. To do this, they analyzed the light of the sun. Because every element leaves its trace in the spectrum of sunlight. In a study from 2014, the team led by astrophysicist Nicolas Grevesse from the University of Liege found that in the sun there are only eight gold atoms for every trillion hydrogen atoms.
8 Atoms for Every Trillion Hydrogen Atoms. That is not a big number. Or is it?
That doesn’t sound like much at first. But if you consider that the mass of the sun corresponds to 1.99 quintillion tons or 332,946 times the mass of the earth, it is a lot. The total mass of gold in the sun amounts to 2.34 trillion tons. A trillion is a number with 18 zeros.
So, how much is 2.34 trillion tons of gold?
All oceans on earth contain water with a total weight of around 1.3 trillion tons. So, there is almost twice as much gold in the sun as there is water in the world’s oceans, at least in terms of weight. If the moon were to be formed from the sun’s gold, it would have a diameter of around 620 kilometers. Which means if Darth Wader was a gold loving Multi-trillionaire, he could have built the Death Star out of Gold. The reserves of gold on earth appears rather poor compared to the solar treasury. Around 150,000 tons of gold have been mined on our planet and processed into jewelry and bars.
Gold cubes reach into space
If the entire gold supply of mankind were poured into cubes, it would have an edge length of just 20 meters and a surface area of just 2.4 KM. The gold of the sun, on the other hand, would result in a cube with an edge length of almost 500 kilometers and a surface area of 1.5 Million KM.
Can We Mine the Gold from the Sun Or Can we all become Billionaires?
It would not make sense to mine the sun’s gold apart from the fact that this is currently not technically possible. But even if we develop the Technical abilities to Mine Gold from Sun, we would probably not do it because during the mining, with the increasing amount of gold, its price would continue to fall. Maybe it would be almost worthless in the end. We may mine it if we develop a technology like Warp Drive or a Dyson Sphere that may require a huge amount of gold.
Incidentally, the gold in the sun was there before it was created. It was sitting in the rotating cloud of dust and gas from which the sun and planets formed more than four billion years ago. Where the gold in this cloud comes from is controversial. Recent observations suggest that gold was formed from other elements when neutron stars collided and were eventually scattered throughout the universe.
Instead of the city of Gold we have found the Sun of Gold. Now Keep Thinking about what will you do with all the money you don’t have from trading the Gold you can’t Mine?