Stable Roentgenium Claimed Found In Gold 160
eldavojohn writes "Amnon Marinov, a physicist specializing in super heavy elements, claims that a stable isotope of roentgenium is commonly found alongside gold, just in very small quantities that we could not measure before. To prove this, he boiled gold in a vacuum, postulating that as the gold evaporated, the roentgenium should remain. He did this for two weeks and then passed the resulting mess through a mass spectrometer and was left with several peaks that could be explained away except for one. Marinov lead the team that found the first super heavy 122 thorium isotope in nature a few years back and now claims that, despite all indications that this super heavy element shouldn't exist longer than a few seconds, he has found a stable isomer of roentgenium in nature. Is he on to something, or overlooking a simpler explanation in his quest for evidence of the island of stability long theorized by physicists?"
I'll take two (Score:2)
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Simply boil all your gold into vapor, and you'll have an even more valuable collection of roentgenium. You won't be able to see it, but it's there, trust me.
If you have any further questions you can ask my operative, conveniently located outside your house looking after a totally unrelated condensing jar.
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And I will be happy to recycle that vaporized gold for you, just so the neighbourhood children don't accidentally inhale it.
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Thats great I've got a hundred megabytes of the stuff in my mailer.
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How many MB does it take to equal 1 gram, using E=mc^2 and making some assumptions about how much energy it takes to create, transmit and store 1 MB of information? I suspect you don't even have a picogram.
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I used to have this amusing rhetorical question, "How much does a bit weigh?". But after reading an article in Scientific American a couple of years ago, I learned that the proper measure of a bit is not mass but area. I don't recall the whole deal but this is as close as I can remember: It turns out, according to the article, that conservation of entropy requires that information be conserved at the event horizon of a black hole, so the area of a black hole (as defined by the surface of the event horizo
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Of course we know of such things as Cherenkov and Hawking radiation, which could -- just maybe -- serve to preserve that "lost information". But if so, nobody today has a clue about how that may be determined.
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Of course we know of such things as Cherenkov and Hawking radiation, which could -- just maybe -- serve to preserve that "lost information".
Cherenkov radiation is emitted when a charged particle travels faster than light in a medium (such a electrons in water, where the speed of light is 25% or so less than in vacuum) and has absolutely nothing to do with the information dynamics of black holes, of which the GP gives a somewhat garbled but not entirely wrong account of.
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By the way: there is no such thing as "conservation of entropy". Entropy increases. Period.
I should have said conservation of information - which IIRC is itself somewhat controversial - isn't this an area of rather heated discussion among the physicists?
OTOH, (also IIRC), entropy and (loss of) information are duals or two sides of the same coin - entropy from the information-theoretic point of view is loss of information, which also from the mass-energy point of view is loss of energy. The 'heat death' can also be described as the reduction of all information to randomness. So conservation of e
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Interesting if true (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm also wondering how Marinov suspected it would be in gold. The only link I can find is that they're both group 11 elements, but by that logic you should be able to find tellurium in sulfur, which isn't the case.
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Actually platinum is the element just below gold... :)
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In an alphabetical list of the element's names, hafnium is the element just below gold, and in an alphabetical list of chemical symbols, boron is just below gold, but that's not important now. And stop calling me "Shirley".
Re:Interesting if true (Score:5, Interesting)
but by that logic you should be able to find tellurium in sulfur, which isn't the case
Maybe it is, but not at levels that have been detectable before, as in this case. However the following link seems to indicate that Tellurium is found in Sulfides [google.com].
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Re:Interesting if true (Score:5, Informative)
Sulfur is more reactive, so the geological and chemical processes which form sulfur deposits also separate it from gold. Gold doesn't react with as many things as sulfur, so an element with similar characteristics will be more diluted in sulfur than in a gold deposit. On the other hand, if this element does indeed also travel with sulfur then there's a chance that larger amount might be in the larger sulfur deposits even if there's less per ton.
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If it does have an obscure stable state it could make a fantastic rocket fuel.
Or bomb.
I'm missing something (Score:2)
How does the presence of a previously unknown stable state make this such a great energetic material? For this to be the case, there would have to be a big energy difference between the stable and unstable states, and if that were the case, all of the stuff in the unstable state would promptly convert to the stable state.
And in any case, we've already got lots of really good energetic materials for rockets and/or bombs that are a lot easier to make than roentgenium.
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I am thinking it would be more like uranium. If this state of roentgenium is rare and barely stable then injecting a small amount of energy may lead to it decaying to a different state and releasing a lot more energy.
Re:Interesting if true (Score:5, Funny)
I'm also wondering how Marinov suspected it would be in gold. The only link I can find is that they're both group 11 elements, but by that logic you should be able to find tellurium in sulfur, which isn't the case.
Of course not, everyone knows that elements form their cliques based on their classification, not the group # they've been assigned. This is why you see Hydrogen sleeping around with all the other non-metals and not really with any of the Alkali Metals. Everyone knows that Sulfur is a non-metal and Tellurium is a metalloid, and metalloids are known for being really a really exclusive group - they wouldn't even let Aluminium in despite her flexible standards.
No, I'm pretty sure Marinov studied the social situation amongst the elements pretty closely and determined that transitional metals - since they are going through puberty - are noticing all those really weird little changes. I mean gold has become a little more malleable to the ladies, copper and silver are noticing their skin has started conducting these little tiny dots.
Its only a natural part that Gold has started to notice its growing a new element in odd places. Don't be worried, its all part of the process.
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So probably just assumed every element could be found in a piece of gold
Yes, you have correctly identified exactly how scientists think: we just kind of randomly assume stuff with no basis, and then spend thousands of hours on expensive and difficult experiments and observations hoping our random assumptions are correct.
Or sometimes, just for a change of pace, we consider carefully things like the chemistry and geology of gold deposits and the known processes of fractionation of heavy elements in the Earth's crust, and design our experiments and observations around a good unde
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Well, not having read up on him much, could this just be a case of the lamppost principle? Maybe some particular technology allows gold impurities to be separated more readily than in other metals. If so, then we might as well see what we find when we look for them.
In theory you're as likely to find a magnetic monopole in a teacup as you are to find one in a massive tank of super-ultra-pure water buried a mile under a mountain in a salt mine. However, you're a lot more likely to detect the monopole in th
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Goldschmidt Classification [wikipedia.org]. Although I too have my doubts about the stable Rg, there is some reason to the madness of expecting certain elements to be found with other ones.
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Re:Interesting if true (Score:5, Interesting)
Elements 110 through 114 have long been expected to be an island of stability. The problem is that we cannot stuff enough neutrons in, as Rg 281 still has too few. So far, the heaviest isotope created is also the most stable. The only problem is that the odd atomic number elements are expected to be less stable, so that 110, 112 or 114 would be more believable. I don't think it's really likely that he has found Rg, but it's not impossible.
Rg, if it exists, would indeed be found as a trace element in Au.
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I don't know, have you checked all the sulfur?
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brb.
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Maybe you don't find tellurium in sulfur, but it sure can take the place of Sulfur. Selenium can give you some pretty bad breath if it gets into your body chemistry, but if you get tellurium into your body, you'll have the worst kind of body odor ever, and it takes months for it to wear off.
You do NOT want "tellurium breath". [corante.com]
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I'm also wondering how Marinov suspected it would be in gold.
Let's see... his test consist of boiling away a few kilos or even many kilos of gold, practically implicitly meaning that at least some of it cannot be recovered...
Oh, I could see a reason. Though I would've been looking in, say, Palladium.
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unobta'i'nium would be even nicer (Score:2)
Brought to you by the letter I and a spelling nazi ;)
Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle (Score:2)
Fiction comes to life?
In the Baroque Cycle, the background story is all about a special, heavy form of gold with magical powers.
Neat.
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In the Baroque Cycle, the background story is all about a special, heavy form of gold with magical powers.
Amazing that I slogged my way through 900 pages of the Baroque Cycle before deciding I couldn't take any more, and yet I still have no clue about this background story you mention.
Thankfully Anathem was not quite as unbearable, if no less overbearing.
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Well, that's what, like half of the first volume?
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Yes, I'm slogging my way thru King of the Vagabonds right now, so please - no spoilers!
Re:Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle (Score:5, Funny)
Snape kills Dumbledore
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Some people just don't appreciate the length, I never had an issue with it and rather enjoyed the books, but the Cycle split up into three books each took me about a month, which is quite a long read for me.
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Where did I say I was confused?
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When I go skiing its always "Treecrash".
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Sonny Bono, is that you? Posting to Slashdot from the great beyond?
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Or one of the Kennedys; skiing + football should have been a bad idea to them you would think...
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Yes, and it's followed by my post-ski-vacation sequel, "Nocash."
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In the extended Star Trek canon dilithium was commonly mistaken for quartz. So, we have prior art on this one. :)
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I don't know if they ever went into that. It was a heavier gold though, but still gold. It was supposed to be Solomon's gold.
Prior work was flawed (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2008, it was claimed to have been discovered in natural thorium samples[1] but that claim has now been dismissed by recent repetitions of the experiment using more accurate techniques.
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Yeah... pretty much... At least Unbibium was somewhat more plausible being closer to the island of relative stability; element 111 isn't even close in nuclear terms.
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On the contrary it is almost exactly on the peak :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Island-of-Stability.png [wikipedia.org]
Re:Prior work was flawed (Score:4, Informative)
111 has an odd number of protons which is strike number one. odd numbers of protons or neutrons are much less stable and strike number two is that the island of stability is for the most part concerning stability against fission and alpha radiation decay.
Strike number three is that the stability of isotopes of element 111 are markedly less stable than isotopes of elements 114-116
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The wikipedia picture is very incorrect then ? I see no tendency on it for odd numbers of protons to bring instability and no element in the 114-116 range is picture as having any sort of stability...
Also, according to this graph ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Table_isotopes_en.svg [wikipedia.org] ) alpha decay and fission seem to be the only decays happening in these regions, no ?
Re:Prior work was flawed (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at this [wisc.edu].
The reason why this is so is that nuclei just like atoms in chemistry have shells (in chemistry it's electrons with nuclei it's protons and neutrons) filled shells are more stable which is why there is an island of stability. The island of stability is centered around the magic numbers 114 (the number of protons) and 184 (the number of neutrons) magic numbers of either protons or neutrons tend to create more stable nuclei. nuclei with odd numbers of either are less stable in the same way that Fluorine is less stable chemically compared to Neon. The nuclear shell is not full and is therefore less stable to various modes of decay.
Your point concerning alpha and fission modes of decay is more likely to increase the half life significantly excluding electron capture and beta decay modes.
elements 114-116 have isotopes with half lives that are significantly higher than nuclei in the 100-113 range as these lower nuclei tend to have half lives measured in fractions of a second. The island of stability is a misnomer. It'd be far more accurate to say that it is an island of relative not absolute stability. The odds of finding any nuclei beyond uranium with a comparable half life or even stable nuclei is remote.
Re:Prior work was flawed (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is what Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says about the previous discovery of Unbibium by this the team:
In 2008, it was claimed to have been discovered in natural thorium samples[1] but that claim has now been dismissed by recent repetitions of the experiment using more accurate techniques.
This is like the guy who keeps claiming new record-shattering high temperature superconductors which are are never confirmed by anyone (and who keeps showing up on Slashdot). Far-fetched claims from Arxiv.org should be prominently flagged as suspect if they are going t get posted here. I have yet to see one pan out.
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I feel this is dubious (Score:3, Informative)
The previous discovery of Element 122 in thorium was shown to be incorrect at higher levels of accuracy; thus, it seems unlikely that this one will bear fruit, especially since roentgenium shouldn't be stable for more than seconds.
It still may bear out, but I consider that extremely unlikely.
But can it be used for (Score:2)
Cold Fusion??? ;-)
Those who don't know their history... (Score:2)
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It's at least plausible. We're so set up to detect superheavy radioactives, what happens if an elemental synthesis procedure actually produces a stable superheavy nucleus (embedded at 1 part in 10^10 in a metal target)? No decay, no detection.
New material for armored vehicles? (Score:2)
I believe this is denser than uranium. Is Israel planning to eventually build specially equipped armored vehicles?
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No, they're hoping the isomer is meta-stable so they can make atomic hand-grenades.
Holy crap, who could possibly afford it? (Score:2)
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Tungsten is used instea of depleted uranium. Hardness matters more than density for weapons. Not that there's any special danger associated with depleted uranium in the envronment - like lead, it causes problems, but no more than any other bullet.
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So, the price determines the density? Ha. Kidding.
Dr. Spork was simply refuting the logic that Khopesh used when he assumed that Roentgenium was denser than Uranium simply based on its atomic number. There are many elements with higher atomic number than Osmium but none denser (that we know of).
For armor, what mostly counts (Score:4, Informative)
is the bond energy and fracture mechanics. For example, ceramic armor breaks into lots of very small particles when hit by a projectile: each fracture surface is created using energy from the incoming projectile, and hence dissipates the projectile's energy. Ceramics aren't very dense compared to tungsten or DU, but their fracture energies are very high. Density counts for projectiles because it's one of the parameters that determines the pressure at the impact point, which in turn is one of the parameters that predicts penetration efficacy. Tungsten is a little more dense than DU, not significantly so for projectile use. A DU projectile will catch fire when it penetrates armor, contributing to its destructive effects. Tungsten doesn't do this. DU is a low-level radiological hazard, tungsten isn't, so for cleaning up after a battle, tungsten is a better choice. DU may have some low-level chemical toxicity, but there's evidence that tungsten (when imbedded as particles under skin) is toxic as well. I speculate the choice of D vs W for projectiles is mainly economic (unless you need to incinerate the occupants of that tank you're killing), as I think DU is cheaper than W.
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Depeleted uranium is cheaper than tungsten if and only if you've got an active nuclear industry. DU is a waste product of uranium enrichment, where tungsten is an industrially-important metal.
Re:replacing depleted uranium (Score:4, Informative)
Not that there's any special danger associated with depleted uranium in the envronment
You are correct that pure DU would essentially be no more hazardous than other types of heavy metal pollution. However, the situation is more complex in reality.
Quoth the WHO [who.int]:
Somehow, I don't find that very reassuring ("Yay! Heavy metal toxicity with a side of biosequestered alpha & beta emitters!"). It seems much more likely that spent-fuel DU production would have less quality control care than the original enrichment process, but I could very well be mistaken.
I have heard it alleged that only the US uses spent reactor fuel to create DU for weapons and that other countries that produce DU weapons use only the byproduct from the enrichment stage. However, since I have no cite at the moment, I wouldn't assign that much credulity. Regardless, it does seem that in practice DU is not always pure as the driven snow.
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So, yeah, it's about as dangerous as lead (even if we believe your non-link, and the impurities were significant in the source metal, they stop being so after a few years). There's this fear about DU because "it's radioactive", and we've all seen what that means in movies. I would have hoped for better from Slashdotters, but see upthread. Compare to the safety of HESH rounds (the usual favorite of tankers), which occasionally fail to explode right away.
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PS. if a radioactive impurity stops being significant "after a few years" then by definition it is quite radioactive. Radioactivity is nifty that way... the more radioactive the isotope, the shorter the half-life. I wou
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But that's just it - the odds of a DU making it from source material to target in less than a few years are quite small indeed. If the DU is pure, there was never more of a problem than lead to begin with (not that aerosolized lead is a nice thing to spray the countryside with). If the DU has radioactice imputities of any significance, it won't still have them after a few years, so still no worse than lead.
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Please understand I am not a breathless radiation paranoiac. In fact, I disclaim my positions as
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Sure, just wanted to add one thought: if you were a grunt in the area where an enemy tank was recently destroyed by an A10, I'm certain you would find it joyful (I know I would). Nothing like the threat of immediate death to clarify one's priorities.
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The claim that it would be cheaper is a bit surprising too : there are mines of uranium...
"the resulting mess" (Score:3)
Wow. Great scientific summary. Why is it a "mess"? Surely it's the output of one carefully controlled process that led to another carefully controlled process that resulted in a particular outcome. Or isn't it? Surely boiling an element in a vacuum is a pretty clean way of doing things? If it's a "mess", then the whole thing is clearly a load of old nonsense.
Either state the results or make it clear it's an editorial. Don't mix them up. Otherwise it's a mess.
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Wow. Great scientific summary. Why is it a "mess"?
A definition of "mess": "An amount of food, as for a meal, course, or dish: cooked up a mess of fish." I've heard it used colloquially as a synonym for "batch" with ironically positive connotations, which is the context that the author used it in.
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Or, it can be used to mean not clean, as in my room is messy; my room is a mess
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The result was a "mess" because the vacuum evaporation process served to concentrate the random impurities within the gold sample.
If you look at the article you'll see a few examples of the random junk found in the remaining reside. Based on mass spectroscopy just a few of the contaminants were identified as 133Cs128Te, 197Au64Zn, 209Bi52Cr, 238U23Na, and 138Th(14N2)1H. That's merely the stuff in mess that was close to the target mass.
I'm not an expert on mass spectroscopy, but I do have a pretty good under
Solomonic gold? (Score:2)
So Stephenson's "solomonic gold" may be based in fact?
Would this gold also be known as Solomonic gold? (Score:2)
Do me a favour. (Score:2)
In articles about science always follow at least to the original article or the preprint and state that explicitly. I am sick and tired of "i am only citing the blog where i found it and not bothering to tell (or check?) if its published, preprint, or just buzz".
This one seems to relate to a preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6510 [arxiv.org]
I am by no means expert on mass spectrometry by some thing they are doing seem strange. I will look at it when a referee examined it for PRL (to which its obviously submitted)
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Yes Slashdot readers owe the favor of not doing slashretweets as articles. If you like to keeps the buzzosphere buzzing, you are welcome. Facebook seems to have a "like it" button and twitters only purpose seems to be right that.
Extraordinary claims... (Score:2)
Wake me when there is independent confirmation of this claim reported somewhere other than arXiv.
"Is he on to something, or overlooking [...]" (Score:2)
Honestly, I don't care. It sounds interesting either way!
Re:Isomer? (Score:5, Informative)
"Nuclear Isomers" exist, which refers to excitation states inside the nucleus. What he is saying is that such a excited state in the nucleus makes the element 'more stable' than its ground state, and thus doesn't decay.
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It still could be an isotope. But not an isomer, per se.
I can fully appreciate the necessity of distinguishing between certain quantum states, but there is no excuse to confuse that with gross structural molecular form, which is what is being referred to when someone says "isomer".
If it is necessary to distinguish betwe
Re:Isomer? (Score:5, Informative)
The term has different meanings in nuclear physics than in chemistry. In nuclear physics, it refers to an unusually long-lived excited state of the nucleus.
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I can fully appreciate the necessity of distinguishing between certain quantum states, but there is no excuse to confuse that with gross structural molecular form, which is what is being referred to when someone says "isomer".
Shape isomers are a well-known type of highly deformed electromagnetic excitation of heavy nuclei that cannot de-excite easily due to their high angular momentum. Photons carry only one unit of spin angular momentum, and to dexcite a shape isomer requires a photon be emitted in a state with very high orbital angular momentum. This gives shape isomers extremely long lives relative to their excitation energy.
The island of stability is not a result of shape isomerism, it is a product of high angular momentum
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How could liquid gold not boil, if it is in a vacuum?
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He holds the liquid gold at 1127C. It would take an approximate pressure of 2.1 * 10^-7 atm for liquid gold to boil at 1127C. Now, it strikes me as very unlikely that he is using a close-to-perfect vacuum for this, especially since running any vacuum at all will encourage evaporation, but without further data, who knows, right?
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Simple - it could be below the boiling point. It's not like every liquid boils at 1K just because it's in a vacuum.
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It can evaporate without boiling.
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Most definitely. That's what theyre talking about.
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Minor issue here, but TFA disagrees with TFS.
The difference between the melting and boiling points for gold is 1800K at 1 atm.
What does that have to do with this discussion? I thought the whole point was that he was at 0 atm.
Boiling is done two different ways. One is raising the temperature, the other is decreasing the pressure of surrounding gas
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Those would be a poor choice, since they're "crown gold". This is an alloy with copper, which makes the coin more durable. As for dissolving, this is possible if the "water" was actually aqua regia--a particular type of acid that dissolves gold.
Then again, perhaps your Krugerrands are only gold on the outside, with a chocolate center. A terrible ripoff. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the chocolate they put in those coins is some of the worst candy ever. Even when I was a kid I was like, "Blech!".
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