© Susan E. Degginger / Alamy Stock PhotoNot gold enough?
New form of gold is much golder than normal goldAll that glitters is not gold - but sometimes it really, really is. Researchers have made a new kind of gold crystal that is even more gold-like than regular gold.
Gold is a precious metal, which means that as well as being attractively shiny it is almost entirely chemically inert. Unlike other metals, it does not rust when exposed to air, and retains its lustre indefinitely.
It's said this property is why wedding rings are traditionally made of gold: it represents an eternity of love. Silver is another such "noble metal", but even silver reacts slowly with oxygen in the air, so requires occasional polishing.
In 2015 Giridhar Kulkarni of the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences in Bangalore, India and his colleagues described
a new form of gold: microcrystals measuring between 2 and 17 micrometres. They made them by heating gold chloride to 220 °C for 30 minutes in the presence of a second chemical called tetraoctylammonium bromide. They look like angular, knobbly sausages.
Comment: Binary objects, like stars, are actually a relatively common feature in the universe: