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I'm going to go this way, where it looks like there is probably a gold sink.

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Which would just be

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in a pool like this.

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I am on a quest for gold. Since

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NASA's James Webb Space telescope has a microscopic layer on the mirrors

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I want to know, where does gold really come from?

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Now, California is known for gold. It flows through the rivers,

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and is embedded in the mountains, but is this really where gold originates?

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Where Does Gold Come From?

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Elements of Webb

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I know, I'm giving a terrible example of what panning looks like.

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But at this point I had already driven all the way to the San Gabriel Mountains

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only to find that it is now illegal to pan for gold because it is

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is now a national monument. It would just be our luck

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that we ran into Bill Schuster, who's family has own property

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for a really long time in the mountains. And he really showed me to how to properly pan for gold.

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The first thing you've got to know, is that you’re going to get wet.

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So don't worry about getting wet.

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Gold Schooled. Gold is so heavy, the ripples will catch it.

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Most people are so scared that they're going to lose gold.

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Believe me, it will not go out.

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I already see two pieces. Two big pieces.

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There you go. So gold is incredibly rare. We can take

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all the gold that we've ever mined, or paned,

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and stick it into three Olympic sized pools.

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And the reason gold is so rare, is because it isn’t even

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from Earth, it's extraterrestrial.

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As it turns out, finding gold cosmic origins

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is a topic of hot debate. So I needed an expert to help me understand

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and luckily, Mansi was in the area.

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Do you like to wear gold? Yeah, in fact I got this gold ring in India myself.

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Gold is one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. In fact, if you peaked into its nucleus,

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it would be filled with 197 neutrons and protons.

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And until a few years ago, we had no idea

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how gold was made in the Universe.

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Scientists debated what energetic event could make heavy elements.

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Is the power of a supernova enough? Or does it need more?

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That turns out to be very difficult to synthesize

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in any ordinary cosmic explosion. You need a very special explosion

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that can actually synthesize heavy elements like gold by R-Process.

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Now the R-Process is one of the ways to make heavy elements

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like gold. It is another way to say Rapid Neutron

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Capture Process and it happens in a matter of a couple of seconds.

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On August 17th, 2017, when the 2 neutron

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stars merged, that’s when we saw the hallmark

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infrared signature for the very first time. Now this neutron star merger

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was and still is a big deal. It's the only

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only time scientists have witnessed and measured the R-process in action.

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And up until then, it was all theoretical.

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Let's begin with 2 neutron stars spiraling towards each other and then

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merging to give birth to a black hole.

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This is where we think we saw for the very first time the gold being synthesized.

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You have an abundant supply of free neutrons. So when these neutrons

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they are able to bind to each other, join together and under go rapid capture.

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And this rapid capture gives you a slew

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of heavy elements all the way up to gold.

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What I learned is that like all heavy elements on Earth,

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gold has been here since Earth was formed.

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It was floating around the gas and dust that formed our sun

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and all the planets that formed in our solar system.

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But gold is heavy, much of what we find comes up through many veins running through the crust.

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That's why we often find gold alongside rivers

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and volcanoes.

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But what is even more poetic, is that we are using an element,

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forged in the death of stars,

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to investigate the dawn of our Universe.

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music

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music