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I have a drawer at home full of leather offcuts I cannot bring myself to throw away. They are scraps, most of them, the edges trimmed off wallets and card holders I made by hand back when I was teaching myself leathercraft and slowly turning it into a small side business. Objectively they are waste. To me they are the evidence of something. I worked for those scraps, and that work changed how I see them.

If you have ever kept a wonky mug a child made, or refused to bin a piece of furniture you built badly, you already know the feeling I am describing.

And there is a name for it.

A quick note before I go further. I am not a psychologist or a neuroscientist, just a writer who makes things and reads widely. What follows is reflection on a handful of studies, most of them observational or small, not advice about how you should work or think.

The IKEA effect is the tendency to place a disproportionately high value on things you helped make. It was named and documented by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely in a 2012 paper with the lovely title “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love”. Across four studies using IKEA boxes, origami and Lego, people consistently rated their own clumsy creations as “similar in value to experts’ creations”. 

The number that tends to get repeated comes from the first experiment in the paper. Builders bid an average of $0.78 for the plain storage boxes they had assembled themselves, while non-builders bid an average of $0.48 for the identical pre-built box, a premium of roughly 63 percent. 

The authors are blunt about it. They write that “labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor: even constructing a standardized bureau, an arduous, solitary task, can lead people to overvalue their (often poorly constructed) creations”. Note the “can.” This is a tendency, not a law.

And there is one important catch, and it matters for where I am going. The effect only showed up when the labor succeeded. When people failed to finish, or built something and then took it apart, the extra value vanished. Effort that goes nowhere does not buy attachment. Completed effort does.

Now sit that next to the thing reshaping how a lot of us work. Generative AI is, broadly, a labor remover. It takes much of the cognitive grind out of writing, coding, summarising, drafting. Or at least it’s supposed to. The output arrives, often decent, and the effort that used to produce it simply did not happen.

If the IKEA effect is right that we love what we labor over, the obvious question is what we feel about what we did not labor over at all.

A 2025 study looked at this. In “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, researchers had 54 people write essays using an LLM, a search engine, or nothing but their own heads, while measuring brain activity. The people who leaned on the LLM reported the lowest sense of ownership over what they had written, and showed the weakest brain connectivity of the three groups. Many of them struggled to quote back the essay they had just produced.

And this seems to show up on the other side too: not just in how creators feel about AI-assisted work, but in how audiences judge it. In a 2023 study, “Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork”, researchers found that people tended to prefer artworks they believed were human-made over artworks they believed were AI-made. Part of that preference came down to the qualities people associated with human creation: intention, emotion, effort, and a sense that someone was actually behind the work.

That matters because the Ikea effect is not really about furniture. It is about ownership. We do not only value the finished object. We value the effort we believe went into it. And when that effort feels absent — whether we are the maker or the audience — something in the value seems to drop.

I notice this in my own days. I use AI for parts of my writing work: the research, the lookup, the first-pass structuring, the awkward sentence I cannot quite untangle. But the pieces I feel most attached to are still the ones where I had to wrestle with the idea myself. The ones where I got annoyed, deleted half of it, walked away, came back, and finally found the line I was looking for.

The other risk here is not just that AI-made things feel less ours. It is that the effort we skip might have been doing something for us beyond producing the object.

A 2025 study by Michael Gerlich found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking. This one study so but put beside the IKEA finding about failed labor and a pattern suggests itself. The value, in both the products study and our own heads, seems to live in the completed effort, not the finished result. Skip the effort and you may keep the result while losing what the effort was quietly building.

I do not buy the idea that AI is something to refuse. I use it. It is genuinely useful. What the leather drawer and the writing work both tell me is that the value was never really in the object. It was in the doing.

So the practical move, for me at least, is not to do everything the hard way out of nostalgia. It is to be deliberate about which labor I keep. Let the machine carry the parts that are pure friction with no learning in them. Hold onto the parts where the effort is the point, where struggling through is what builds the skill or the judgment or the sense that the thing is mine.

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“The Great Wall of China is not visible from orbit with the naked eye. It’s too narrow, and it follows the natural contours and colours of the landscape.” So wrote the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield from the International Space Station during his five-month tour in 2012-2013. Hadfield’s posting was one of dozens of public statements from astronauts who have attempted, and failed, to see the Great Wall from orbit. The consensus among people who have been to space is unambiguous. The wall is not visible from the International Space Station, was not visible from any Apollo mission, was not visible from the Soviet Salyut and Mir stations, and was not visible to China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, who spent 21 hours in orbit on the Shenzhou V mission in October 2003.

The result has produced a small but durable embarrassment for the popular fact that “the Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible from space.” The claim is one of the most widely-repeated pieces of geographical trivia in modern circulation, taught in textbooks, repeated in documentaries, and frequently invoked in casual conversation. It is wrong on at least three counts. The wall is not visible. It is not the only human-made object. And the claim itself predates the technology that would have been needed to verify it.

What astronauts actually report

According to BBC Sky at Night Magazine’s review of the question, the issue with the Great Wall is straightforward: it is too narrow and too poorly differentiated from its surroundings to be visible at orbital distances. The wall averages roughly 5 to 9 metres in width along most of its length. The International Space Station orbits at approximately 400 kilometres altitude. At that scale, the wall is far below the resolving power of the unaided human eye. The wall is also constructed largely of local materials — stone, rammed earth, brick — that share the colour of the surrounding landscape, eliminating the contrast that would be necessary to pick out a narrow feature against its background.

Yang Liwei was direct about the matter when he returned from orbit in 2003. According to Al Jazeera’s coverage of his post-flight interview, Yang told China Central Television that “the scenery was very beautiful, but I didn’t see the Great Wall.” The statement was politically inconvenient enough that Chinese state media reported it carefully, and the country’s geography textbooks were subsequently revised to remove the claim that the Great Wall was visible from space. The American astronaut Leroy Chiao, then commander of the International Space Station, took what is generally considered the first verifiable photograph of the wall from orbit on 24 November 2004, using a digital camera with a 180mm telephoto lens. A second, more famous Chiao photograph followed on 20 February 2005, taken with a 400mm lens in favourable conditions with snow cover and shadows helping to identify the position of the wall against the landscape. Even with the better lens, only short sections of the wall could be identified, and only after extensive comparison with maps.

The Apollo astronauts addressed an even stronger version of the claim. The original popular framing held that the Great Wall was visible from the Moon, a claim several Apollo crews had the opportunity to test directly. Alan Bean of Apollo 12 famously said: “The only thing you can see from the Moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white, some blue and patches of yellow, and every once in a while some green vegetation. No man-made object is visible at this scale.” Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Jim Lovell, and Jim Irwin all confirmed the same observation. From lunar distance, Earth is a marble. No surface features of any kind, natural or artificial, can be distinguished.

What is visible from orbit

The interesting part of the story, often lost in the popular framing, is what astronauts can in fact see. According to NBC News’s coverage of the question, which interviewed astronaut Ed Lu of Expedition Seven aboard the ISS, astronauts in low Earth orbit can readily see cities, highways, airports, bridges, large dams, ships at sea, and the wakes of large vessels. At night, the artificial lighting of major cities is visible from orbit as bright patterns against the dark sides of continents. Sufficiently large vehicles — aircraft on runways, container ships — can be made out with the naked eye. The list of human-made objects visible from the International Space Station with no optical aid runs to dozens of categories.

The reason these things are visible and the Great Wall is not has to do with size and contrast, not with the impressive scale or fame of the structure in question. The Great Pyramid of Giza, much shorter than the Great Wall but far wider — about 230 metres on each side — is closer to the threshold of orbital visibility, particularly at low sun angles when the play of light and shadow distinguishes it against the surrounding desert. Astronauts have attempted to see the Pyramid with the naked eye and have produced inconsistent reports. The Great Wall, despite being orders of magnitude longer, is at least an order of magnitude too narrow to compete.

Where the myth came from

The most widely-circulated modern version of the claim is generally traced to a Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon published in 1932, which stated that the Great Wall of China was “the mightiest work of man, the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the Moon.” Ripley’s was, at the time, one of the most popular newspaper features in the United States, syndicated to hundreds of papers with a combined readership in the tens of millions. The cartoon planted the claim firmly in mid-20th-century popular consciousness, and from there it propagated through textbooks, encyclopaedias, and casual conversation for the next several decades.

The 1932 cartoon was not the earliest version of the idea. The English antiquarian William Stukeley, in a letter dated 1754 about Hadrian’s Wall and later published in his Family Memoirs (1887), wrote that “this mighty wall of four score miles in length is only exceeded by the Chinese Wall, which makes a considerable figure upon the terrestrial globe, and may be discerned at the Moon.” Stukeley’s remark, written more than two centuries before any human had been to space, is the earliest documented version of the claim. The English journalist and travel writer Henry Norman repeated a similar assertion in his 1895 book on the Far East, calling the wall “the only work of human hands on the globe visible from the Moon.” Both of these earlier sources existed in obscurity until historians traced the popular myth backward. Ripley’s, in 1932, brought the claim out of antiquarian obscurity and into the mass cultural mainstream.

The Ripley’s organisation has, in the decades since, hosted on its own website a careful debunking of the claim that originated in one of its cartoons. The Great Wall, the modern Ripley’s article notes, cannot be seen from the Moon, cannot reliably be seen with the naked eye from the International Space Station, and required favourable conditions and a long telephoto lens for even the most successful orbital photograph of it. The claim that survived in popular culture for seven decades was never tested against orbital observation until orbital observation became possible, and the moment it was tested, it failed.

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I came across Pascal’s line again the other day and did the thing you do with a good quote: nodded, felt a little seen, moved on. Then it followed me out the door.

I went for a walk that evening, the way I usually do, and somewhere along the way I noticed the phone in my pocket. I wasn’t looking at it. But it was there, the way it’s always there, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time I sat in a room with nothing in it. No screen, no book, no podcast, no plan. Just me, staying put.

What Pascal wrote, in his Pensées, felt relevant, modern even: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” But he was writing in the 1600s, long before notifications and screens.

I suppose, the uncomfortable thing about silence is that it does not feel productive while it is happening. Nothing is being consumed. Nothing is being answered. Nothing is being crossed off a list.

But that does not mean nothing is happening. 

When the mind is not being fed by a screen, a podcast, a book, or another little hit of instruction, it starts doing something we rarely give it time to do: wander, sort, connect, and return to whatever has been sitting underneath the noise. Research on mind-wandering, by Akina Yamaoka and Shintaro Yukaw, has suggested that this kind of mental drifting can help with creative problem-solving, especially when we are doing something simple enough to leave part of the mind free.

Walking seems to do something similar. A 2014 Stanford study titled “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking” found that people produced more creative ideas while walking and shortly afterward.

So maybe silence is not just the absence of distraction. Maybe it is one of the few conditions in which the mind gets to catch up with itself.

I would like to tell you I have this one figured out. I don’t. The closest I get is the walk, and the walk has a phone in it. The other thing I reach for is coffee in the morning before I touch a screen, which I manage some days and lose on others. It comes and goes. There are mornings I am halfway through an email before the kettle has boiled. So when I read Pascal, my honest reaction isn’t agreement so much as recognition. He is describing me.

It turns out I am not unusual. University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson ran a series of studies that asked people to sit alone in a bare room for a few minutes with nothing to do but think.

They did not enjoy it.

Given the option, many chose to give themselves a small electric shock rather than sit there quietly: twelve of eighteen men in one version, and one of them pressed the button 190 times. People would rather be jolted than be left alone with their own heads.

You would think the lesson is to march yourself into the empty room and stay until you get good at it. But the part that stuck with me came from Wilson himself. He was careful to say he did not yet have the evidence but admitted he remained convinced that “the mind may be freed up if it’s mildly engaged in the world, such as going for a walk or looking out a window.”

That stopped me, because it is more or less the only version of this I actually do. Not the empty room. The walk. The window. The cup of coffee where the only thing happening is the coffee. I had been filing these under cheap substitute, the thing you settle for when you can’t manage the real, monkish article. Maybe they are not the substitute. Maybe, for a mind that was never trained to sit in a void, a little motion is the way in rather than a way around.

What the phone takes from me isn’t really the grand stillness Pascal had in mind. I was never going to sit cross-legged in an empty room anyway. What it takes is the small stuff: the walk where my thoughts get to wander instead of being handed something to look at, the ten minutes with a coffee before the day starts talking. Those are the gaps where whatever I have been avoiding tends to surface, and I notice I have gotten very good at filling them before they can.

I am not going to pretend I am about to become a person who sits in silent rooms. But I have started leaving the phone in the pocket on the walk on purpose now, instead of by accident, and trying to win the morning coffee more often than I lose it. Pascal would probably consider this a low bar. He might be right. But at least it is a bar I can actually reach.. 

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The image most of us have of a gratitude journal is a little precious. A leather notebook, a quiet corner, a candle maybe, and a person carefully composing several lines about the sunset and the smell of coffee. It looks like a ritual you have to earn the time for.

This was the image I used to have of it at least, and I think because it looks like that for some, many of us never start, or start once and quietly let it go.

When I went looking at the actual research on this, I expected it to be flimsier than the hype. It was, in fact, sturdier than I thought, and also much smaller and less precious than the candle version suggests.

A quick note before we go further: I am a curious generalist, not a psychologist. What follows is my reading of the research, not advice for your situation. The studies here are observational or short experimental trials, and population-level patterns are not promises about what any one person will feel.

The modern science of this traces back to a 2003 paper by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens.” As put by the researchers, across three experiments, “gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison group.” The findings suggested that taking account of what we have in life has emotional and interpersonal benefits. 

The benefits are also well backed up by experts like those at UCLA Health who not that gratitude can help to reduce depression and anxiety, relieve stress and even improve heart health. 

But here’s the twist. Doing it more often does not always appear to be better. A frequency study led by Sonja Lyubomirsky, reported by the Greater Good Science Center, found that people who journaled once a week for six weeks felt happier afterward, while people who did it three times a week did not. The likely reason is the thing that quietly undermines most good feelings. As Emmons puts it, “We adapt to positive events quickly, especially if we constantly focus on them. It seems counterintuitive, but it is how the mind works.” That single line reframes the whole thing for me. The instinct, if you believe something is good for you, is to do it harder and more often.

The writing is something I think we should touch on, too. It’s not just a way of recording the gratitude, it seems. It might be where a lot of the work happens. Emmons describes it this way: “Writing helps to organize thoughts, facilitate integration, and helps you accept your own experiences and put them in context.”

I think most of us already feel grateful for things in a vague, passing way. The dog is fine, the work email got sorted, a friend texted back. These thoughts float by and dissolve. Putting one of them into a sentence forces you to decide what it actually was and why it mattered, and that small act of naming is what seems to give it weight. The guidance that has settled out of this body of work leans toward depth over breadth, one thing properly felt rather than ten things listed flat.

The reassuring thing is that the experts do not ask for the candle. Emmons is blunt about it: “You don’t need to buy a fancy personal journal to record your entries in, or worry about spelling or grammar.” And against all the tidy tips, he keeps one honest caveat in play, that “there is no one right way to do it.” That line matters more than any of the prescriptions around it, because it takes the pressure off getting it right.

So the version I would actually defend is almost embarrassingly small. A few lines, once or twice a week, on whatever is at hand. Not a ritual, not a system, just the act of jotting down a few things we are grateful for. 

If the reason you are reading about gratitude is that things have felt heavy lately, that is worth taking seriously. A journal is a fine thing, but a good therapist is a better one when the weight is real.

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On 27 May 1843, the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain was granted British Patent No. 9745 for what he called an electric printing telegraph: a device that used synchronised pendulums to scan a flat metal surface and reproduce its markings, line by line, at a receiving station over a telegraph wire. The patent describes the basic working principle of a fax machine. Bain had invented one. The same year, Charles Dickens was publishing A Christmas Carol, Queen Victoria was six years into her reign, and Alexander Graham Bell, the eventual inventor of the telephone, was minus 4 years old. The fax machine predates the telephone by more than three decades.

The corresponding window of chronological overlap produces one of the more peculiar facts about nineteenth-century technology. The fax existed from 1843. Abraham Lincoln lived until 1865. The Japanese samurai class, despite the popular impression of belonging to a distant feudal past, was still a recognised legal caste in Japanese society throughout Lincoln’s lifetime and was not formally dismantled until well into the 1870s. There was, therefore, a 22-year window — from 1843, the patent of Bain’s machine, until Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 — during which a samurai could, in theory, have sent a fax to the sitting president of the United States. As a Truth or Fiction analysis of the popular version of this claim documents, the fact has circulated as an internet meme since July 2021 and the underlying chronology checks out, with the kind of practical qualifications that the word “theoretically” exists to cover.

Alexander Bain’s machine

According to Britannica’s biography of Alexander Bain, Bain’s invention came less than seven years after Samuel Morse had patented the electric telegraph. Bain was a clockmaker who had already patented the world’s first electric clock in 1841, and his fax machine grew directly out of his clockwork expertise. The patent describes a system in which two pendulums, one at the transmitting station and one at the receiving station, are synchronised by an electric clock and made to scan their respective metal surfaces line by line. According to HowStuffWorks’s history of the fax machine, the transmitting station’s metal surface was covered with raised metal type. As the pendulum’s stylus passed over the type, it closed an electrical circuit, sending a pulse down the telegraph wire. At the receiving station, the pulse caused a corresponding stylus to mark a piece of chemically treated paper that had been impregnated with a solution. The marks built up, line by line, into a reproduction of the original document.

Bain’s machine was rudimentary by modern standards. The pendulums drifted out of synchronisation, the printed images were faint, and the transmission speed was slow. But it worked, and the principle was sound. The Englishman Frederick Bakewell improved on it in 1848 with a rotating cylinder, and the Italian Giovanni Caselli took the technology to commercial maturity in 1865 with his pantelegraph, which operated a regular commercial fax service between Paris and Lyon between 1865 and 1870. Several thousand documents were transmitted over Caselli’s system, including business correspondence and the signatures on financial instruments. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated as president in 1861, fax technology was no longer experimental. It was a working communications medium in commercial use in Europe.

Why the samurai had not yet been abolished

The popular image of the samurai as a figure from medieval Japan obscures the fact that the samurai class survived until well into the modern industrial era. The transition began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and restored imperial rule, but the dismantling of the samurai class itself was a gradual process that played out over the following decade. According to KCP International’s overview of the abolition of the samurai class, the relevant landmarks were the 1871 abolition of the han domain system, the 1873 Conscription Ordinance that ended the samurai’s military monopoly by establishing a Western-style national army, and the 1876 Haitōrei Edict that prohibited the samurai from carrying their characteristic two-sword set in public. The 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, led by the disaffected samurai Saigō Takamori, was the last armed resistance to the new order, and its defeat marks the practical end of the samurai as a political force.

For the full duration of Lincoln’s life and presidency, none of this had yet happened. When Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865, the Tokugawa shogunate was still nominally in power, the samurai were still the legally recognised warrior class, and the Boshin War that would dismantle the old regime was still three years away. The viral meme’s specific date of 1867 is an approximation of when the Meiji process began, rather than when the samurai class actually ended, but the broader point holds: the samurai class as a feudal institution was still intact throughout the Lincoln presidency, and the chronological overlap with the fax-machine patent is real.

What “theoretically” is doing

The word “theoretically” in the popular framing of the fact is doing important work. The fax machine existed. The samurai existed. Lincoln existed. All three overlapped in time. What did not exist, during this same window, was the infrastructure that would have been required for an actual transmission. Bain’s machine, like every 19th-century fax system, required a continuous telegraph wire connecting the sending and receiving stations.

Japan did not have a working domestic telegraph network until 1869, four years after Lincoln’s death. The first transpacific telegraph cable connecting Japan to North America was not completed until 1906. A samurai in Japan attempting to fax Washington in 1864 would have faced the immediate problem that there was no wire connecting his country to anything beyond its shores. The technology of the fax existed. The wires necessary to use it across an ocean did not.

The qualification extends further than people who have not looked into it tend to assume. According to a History.com account of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, the first cable was completed in August 1858, with Queen Victoria sending the inaugural message to President James Buchanan on 16 August, but the cable failed within weeks and went silent. A second attempt in 1865 broke during the laying and was abandoned. The first reliable, continuously-operating transatlantic telegraph cable was not in service until 27 July 1866 — more than a year after Lincoln’s assassination. For the full duration of Lincoln’s presidency, from March 1861 to April 1865, no electric signal could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean by any means. All communication between Europe and North America during the American Civil War travelled by ship, taking roughly two weeks each way. A samurai in Paris with full access to Caselli’s pantelegraph and the entire European telegraph network of 1864 would still have been unable to send a fax to Washington. The wire to do so did not exist.

The chronology, in other words, is more concrete than it sounds, and the impossibility of the actual transmission is more concrete still. Bain’s 1843 patent is a real document. The samurai’s continued legal existence through the 1860s is a real fact. Lincoln’s presidency overlapped both. The 22-year window in which all three coexisted is the kind of fact that resists easy mental categorisation, because the popular images of “samurai” and “fax machine” sit in mental boxes that do not normally touch. The boxes touched, briefly, in the middle of the nineteenth century. They just happened to do so on opposite sides of an ocean that, for the duration of the overlap, no electric signal could yet cross.

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What follows is reflection on a long-running piece of research, not advice. We are writers and editors reading the literature, not clinicians, psychologists, or therapists. The study at the centre of this piece is observational, and patterns drawn from one cohort are not prescriptions for any single reader’s life.

In 1938, what became the Harvard Study of Adult Development began with the Grant Study, which followed 268 Harvard sophomores. It was later combined with the Glueck Study, which followed 456 boys from Boston. The study not now includes these mens’ offspring. 

The aim was modest and a little vague: to watch ordinary lives unfold and learn what kept people healthy. Nearly nine decades later, it is still running, now with a broader participant base. 

When the researchers pooled what they had collected and looked for what predicted a good old age, the obvious candidates underperformed.  The study director, Robert Waldinger has put it this way:  “When we gathered together everything we knew about them about at age 50, it wasn’t their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships.”  This is a finding from one cohort, not a universal law of medicine, but within this group the relationship measure carried more predictive weight than the markers people tend to worry about.

The pattern appeared elsewhere in the data too. Participants who reported good relationships were, according to summaries of the work, associated with less heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis.

Still, the direction was consistent enough that Waldinger has summed up the headline plainly: good relationships, in his telling, keep us happier and healthier. That is a confident line, drawn from a largely white, male sample, and worth reading as one researcher’s framing of a correlation rather than a settled verdict on everyone.

Waldinger has described the result as a “surprising finding,” that our relationships and how happy we are in them appear to have “a powerful influence on our health.” Influence, not cause. The study cannot prove the arrow runs only one way, and it doesn’t claim to.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the result is how badly it travels. Waldinger’s 2015 TED talk on the study has been viewed more than 29 million times on Youtube alone, and the message is not complicated: tend your close relationships. Anyone who has let a relationship lapse because work felt more urgent has run the small experiment the study runs at scale. The advice is easy to nod at and hard to act on, partly because it competes with everything louder, salaries, titles, the next achievement.

The study’s limits are worth stating plainly, even while taking it seriously. The original cohorts were men, mostly white, and both groups were unusually narrow slices of mid-century America. The headline is a correlation built on that sample, expanded now to spouses and offspring who now number  well over a thousand, but still rooted in one long, specific thread of lives. What it offers is a clue with unusual staying power, not a formula.

If the question of who you are close to, and how that is going, lands somewhere tender, a qualified counsellor or therapist is a good person to talk it through with.

The quiet implication of the study’s own length is the part that stays. It took the better part of a century, four directors, and decades of near-precarious funding to arrive at an answer many people could have guessed at the start. The difficulty was never in finding it. The difficulty is in believing something that ordinary could be the thing that matters most.

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On 17 August 2017, two neutron stars in a galaxy called NGC 4993, about 130 million light-years from Earth, completed a spiral inward that had taken them millions of years and ended in a collision lasting fractions of a second. The gravitational waves from that collision reached Earth and were detected by the LIGO and Virgo observatories. Within hours, telescopes around the world had identified the afterglow of the event across the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves. The event, designated GW170817, was the first confirmed observation of a neutron-star merger. It also resolved one of the longest-standing open questions in astrophysics: where the universe’s gold comes from.

According to the 2017 paper in Nature by Daniel Kasen of UC Berkeley, Brian Metzger of Columbia, and colleagues, the GW170817 event produced and ejected heavy elements totalling approximately 6 percent of a solar mass — roughly 20,000 Earth-masses of material — including about 200 Earth-masses of gold and nearly 500 Earth-masses of platinum, plus comparable quantities of uranium and other elements heavier than iron. The team’s models, developed over the preceding decade in anticipation of exactly this kind of observation, matched the optical and infrared afterglow of the event with sufficient precision to characterise the composition of the ejected material. The colliding neutron stars had assembled, in the violence of their merger, hundreds of times more gold than exists in the entire mass of Earth.

Why ordinary stars cannot make gold

The elements heavier than iron — including silver, gold, platinum, lead, mercury, and uranium — present a problem for the standard theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. Ordinary stars fuse hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon, and continue fusing progressively heavier elements all the way up to iron. The process releases energy, which is what makes stars shine. But fusion stops working at iron. Combining iron nuclei into heavier elements requires an input of energy rather than producing one, so ordinary stellar fusion cannot proceed past iron. Some heavier elements form slowly in giant stars via a process called slow neutron capture, or s-process, which can build elements up to bismuth. The heaviest elements, including gold, require something else.

The “something else” turned out to be a process called rapid neutron capture, or r-process. In r-process nucleosynthesis, atomic nuclei are bombarded with so many free neutrons in such a short time that they absorb neutrons faster than they can decay, building up to extremely heavy and neutron-rich isotopes which then beta-decay into stable heavy elements. The conditions required — enormously high neutron densities, sustained for fractions of a second — exist almost nowhere in the universe. For decades, the leading candidates were rare types of supernovae and the collisions of compact stellar remnants. The 2017 detection settled at least part of the question. Neutron-star mergers really do produce heavy elements via r-process nucleosynthesis, and they do so in quantities sufficient to enrich entire galaxies.

What a neutron-star merger looks like

A neutron star is what remains when a massive star runs out of fuel, collapses, and explodes as a supernova, leaving behind a dense core. A typical neutron star contains roughly 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, compressed into a sphere about 10 kilometres across. A teaspoon of neutron-star material weighs roughly a billion tonnes. The density is comparable to that of an atomic nucleus, because the star is essentially a single giant nucleus made of densely-packed neutrons. When two neutron stars exist in a binary system, they slowly lose energy through gravitational wave emission and spiral inward over geological timescales. The final phase of the inspiral, when the two stars are within a few kilometres of each other, can complete in fractions of a second. The GW170817 neutron stars were spinning around each other more than 300 times per second in the final moments before merger.

The collision itself is described in the literature as a kilonova — a term coined by Brian Metzger and colleagues in 2010, who calculated that the light from a neutron-star merger would be approximately one thousand times brighter than a typical nova explosion but much fainter than a typical supernova. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s coverage of the GW170817 detection, the radioactive decay of the freshly synthesised heavy elements in the ejected debris is what makes a kilonova glow. The team’s models had predicted that this glow would be “tinged red if heavy elements were produced,” distinctive enough to identify the kilonova by its colour signature. The 2017 observations matched the predictions in detail, providing the first direct spectroscopic evidence of r-process nucleosynthesis as it happens.

What this means for the gold on Earth

The gold in any wedding ring, any coin, any bar of bullion sitting in any bank vault on Earth, was produced in events like GW170817 that occurred long before the Solar System existed. The Sun and its planets formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago, from a cloud of interstellar gas and dust that had been enriched, over previous billions of years, by the ejecta of supernovae and kilonovae from the prior generations of stars in the Milky Way. The heavy elements in that cloud, including all the gold, had been scattered across hundreds of light-years by the violence of their original production. The cloud collapsed under its own gravity, the Sun formed at the centre, and the remaining material accreted into the planets. Earth inherited its share of pre-existing heavy elements from this enriched cloud.

The Earth as a whole contains roughly 1.6 × 10²¹ grams of gold, most of it in the planet’s core, where it sank during the molten phase of Earth’s early history. The gold accessible at Earth’s surface, and therefore the gold that has been mined throughout human history, represents a small fraction of the total — itself the result of a late veneer of asteroid impacts that delivered fresh heavy elements to the crust after the core had finished forming. Every gold atom in human possession spent billions of years in interstellar space before it became part of Earth, and was produced billions of years before that in the collision of two dead stars somewhere in the early Milky Way or one of its progenitor galaxies.

The 2017 confirmation also left an open question, which is still under active investigation. According to a 2024 analysis by the astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, the rate of observed neutron-star mergers may be too low to fully account for the abundance of gold and other heavy elements in the present-day universe. Other mechanisms — including a rare type of supernova called a collapsar, in which a massive star’s core collapses directly to a black hole, and magnetar giant flares, in which the magnetic fields of highly magnetised neutron stars rearrange catastrophically — may contribute additional r-process production. The 2017 event confirmed that neutron-star mergers produce gold. It did not settle whether they produce all of it. What is settled is that most of the gold on Earth was forged in events of cosmic violence whose like has not been seen near our solar system since long before our solar system existed.

The post Almost all the gold on Earth — every wedding ring, every coin, every gram in every bank vault — was forged in the collision of dead stars billions of years ago, in events so violent that a single one can produce hundreds of Earth-masses of gold, and the heavy elements were then scattered across the galaxy before our sun was even born appeared first on Space Daily.