Finding the right wedding ring for a man is a top priority if you are soon to be married. Gold is often the metal of choice, which is no surprise given how rare and highly regarded the metal is. But sometimes, it is not appreciated just how special it is.
The main factors are apparent: Gold is extremely rare, it does not tarnish and its colour is immensely attractive. It is not for nothing that gold is seen as the top prize in competition. A married man will be delighted by the thought that he has struck gold in life through his choice of marriage partner, so its use in his wedding ring is very appropriate.
It is these qualities that make us see gold as special, but because so many people wear it as jewellery, it is easy to take it for granted. Yet, they hardly begin to highlight just how exceptional gold is.
Star Quality
At the most basic level, everything in our universe is made from base elements that were formed in stars, which then died, exploded in supernovas and scattered this material across the cosmos to eventually congeal into new worlds and everything in them elsewhere. Our own bodies are made not just from the dust of the Earth, but, before that, stardust.
However, lots of elements, such as hydrogen and oxygen, are very common. By contrast, gold is far rarer, especially on Earth. So is the way it comes to be.
While some elements can be made in most kinds of stars, gold cannot. Our sun can’t make it. Nor can red dwarves (the most common type of star). Instead, it is produced by massive stars that can compress lighter elements to produce heavier ones, such as gold. These elements are released when the star dies and explodes in a supernova.
In addition, when neutron stars, made up of the remnants of supernovae, collide, this creates even larger explosions. This produces more elemental gold. Much of this forms into material found in asteroids and comets and some of that has found its way onto Earth.
Do Look Up
This astronomical origin is something to wonder about. When thinking of getting your wedding rings, you and your beloved may take a stroll on a starry night and look up. You may see many points of light, but this is more than just a visual spectacle.
Just think: that is where the very stuff your wedding ring comes from. You may even say that whole stars collapsed and scattered their dust across the universe just for you to wear it. If that isn’t romantic enough, nothing is.
Of course, the story of how gold formed was not just an interstellar one. Here on Earth, all manner of geological processes, of heat and pressure, of hot fluids rising to the surface from the hot mantle deep below, of volcanic activity, erosion and plate tectonics, all play their part in turning the base elements into gold itself and depositing it in accessible places.
Because it is so rare an element, all this activity can still only produce so much gold. While vast quantities of other metals like iron and copper appear, gold is extremely rare. Estimates of just how much gold there is vary, ranging from 155,000 to 2.5 million tonnes.
Why Alchemy Is A Non-Starter
The thing about gold that makes it even more special is the fact that it is almost impossible to make from any other metal. Had alchemy ever been established, gold would soon have lost its scarcity and, therefore, its value.
Platinum and mercury are exceptions to this, but platinum is even more uncommon to begin with and in either case, the process requires an extensive nuclear reaction and then more processing to stop the resulting gold from being radioactive, all of which is so expensive nobody could make a profit producing gold this way.
This nuclear process is, of course, exactly what goes on in those neutron stars far, far away across the cosmos, the process that, a mind-bogglingly long time ago, produced the gold that ended up on Earth, shaped by a myriad of geological processes and finally mined and shaped to become the ring that will be placed on your finger on your wedding day.
What that means is that while there is great craft and skill in shaping gold into beautiful jewellery that you can wear for life as a symbol of your happiest day on this planet, the process by which this even became possible lie far out in the vastness of space, where, in the furnace and pressure of a star, the most glamorous and romantic of metals was made.