dtilque:
I thought that heavy metals were pretty dangerous as a class, e.g., mercury and lead. Is gold a genuine exception, or is it merely that even if ingested, there’s much less of it than the amount of lead that someone living in a lead-painted house would have entering their bloodstream?
Even mercury and lead aren’t very dangerous in their elemental forms. The toxicity is mostly from compounds of them.
Gold is an exception. It’s the least reactive metal around. As I said, acids don’t dissolve it, except aqua regia. That’s a mixture of one part nitric to three parts hydrochloric acids, which does not occur naturally. So metalic gold passes through your system without causing any problems.
It could cause problems if it’s been reacted with other elements, just like other heavy metals. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Googling suggests it’s actually second, just behind Platinum.
If you have metal fillings in your teeth, what happens if you chew on something covered in gold leaf?
I don’t think supernovas are powerful enough to create atoms with as high an atomic number as gold. You need colliding neutron stars.
As several others have pointed out, the only common acid that will readily dissolve gold is agua regia.
You’ve also asked the question - is it really gone or can it be retrieved?
The dissolution of gold into agua regia is actually one of the primary ways to refine or purify gold on both small and industrial scales. So the gold is very much retriveable and indeed can be of much higher purity than when you started.
Some references:
https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-refining
There is; chrysiasis.
It’s not so much the power of the explosion, but rather the high density of free neutrons. Merging neutron stars (kilonovae) are dimmer than supernovae.
In kilonovae, what produces the heavy elements like gold and platinum is a rapid succession of neutron captures by lighter nuclei like iron. The high density of neutrons means captures are so rapid that the nuclei don’t have time to decay before the next neutron arrives. So the atomic numbers of these nuclei quickly grow to being very heavy elements.
edit - double post.
“At last my plan to bring America to its knees is complete!”
“You fiend! What have you done?”
“I targeted the American economy! I broke into Fort Knox, melted down all of the gold, and then mixed it in with an amount of gold that was ten times larger!”
“…and you left all the gold there?”
"That’s right! Look upon all that gold and know that you will never be able to recover your original gold from the much larger pile of gold in its place!
“You know what? I’m not even going to arrest you.”