Heavy machinery and extreme heat are required to melt gold, but a group of scientists accidentally managed to melt gold at room temperature, making a new scientific breakthrough.
All scientists know that gold’s melting point is 1,064.18 degrees Celsius, which is why an international group of scientists from Sweden and Finland was surprised when a fragment of gold began to melt at room temperature while under a transmission electron microscope (TEM).
Ludvig de Knoop from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden said he was “stunned by the discovery,” adding that during the experiment he was trying to see how gold atoms behave under the highest magnification level of an electron microscope.
What de Knoop stumbled upon was that the top layers of the gold fragment melted at room temperature.
“This is an extraordinary phenomenon, and it gives us new, foundational knowledge of gold,” de Knoop said.