Scientists realized the dream of centuries: Lead was turned into gold for the first time!

^{Image of a tunnel inside the Large Hadron Collider}
For thousands of years, people have dreamed of turning lead into gold. This process was called "chrysopeia" in ancient times, and people have made many attempts to realize this idea. However, it was considered absolutely impossible to do this using chemical reactions. Because lead and gold are very different at the atomic level.

However, physicists at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) have managed to realize this process for the first time in history. This important discovery was made using the world's most powerful particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Newsweek reports.

During the study, physicists accelerated lead nuclei to almost the maximum speed of light (to be exact, to 99.999993 percent of the speed of light), bringing them close to each other almost to the point of collision. These nuclei moved apart at the last moment, causing a photonuclear reaction.

As a result, in rare cases, the lead nuclei lost 3 of their 82 protons. Through this very process, the lead nucleus turned into a gold atom with 79 protons. Scientists observed that these reactions occurred at a rate of 89 thousand times per second. However, the newly created gold atoms decayed in a very short time.

Through this study, scientists confirmed one thing for sure: theoretically, lead can indeed be turned into gold using nuclear methods.

However, this discovery is still only theoretically and experimentally interesting, and in practice it is considered very ineffective. According to scientists, the amount of gold produced from lead was very small. More precisely, the amount of gold created as a result of the experiments is a trillion times less than the amount needed to make a simple wedding ring.

Interestingly, if the goal was to obtain one gram of gold, the Large Hadron Collider would have to be operated continuously for a quadrillion years.

Therefore, scientists consider the idea of producing gold in this way to be completely wrong from a practical point of view. At the same time, this discovery of CERN physicists is of historical importance and is recognized as another big step towards revealing the secrets of nature.

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