“Which planet in the solar system is the richest in gold?”
It all depends on what you mean by richest! Let me explain…
If you mean “Which planet contains the largest quantity of gold, based on the number of gold atoms within the planet?” the answer is easy. It’s Jupiter.
The core of Jupiter is thought to be have a rocky/metallic composition and a mass about 10–20 times that of the Earth, or about 10^26 kilograms. Jupiter’s core is the largest rocky object in the solar system, and so it is also the largest reservoir of gold outside of the Sun. If the gold fraction is similar to that of that of the Earth overall (a reasonable assumption, at least to an order of magnitude), then gold makes up about 250 parts per billion of Jupiter’s core.
Jupiter contains 2.5 x 10^19 kilograms, or 25 quadrillion tons, of gold.
If you mean, “Which planet contains the most recoverable gold?” the answer is also easy. It’s Earth.
Simply put, Earth is the only place in the universe where we know how to find and mine gold. Nobody knows how to dig into the core of Jupiter. Nobody knows how to mine an asteroid, for that matter (there are lots of ideas but no demonstrated technology, not even small-scale tests). But we do know how to find and extract gold on Earth. The total amount of mined gold on Earth is just over 200,000 tons; there is another 53,000 tons of identified gold reserves.
There is much more gold scattered through the oceans, throughout Earth’s crust, and especially in Earth’s core. If you consider Earth as a whole, you can do the same kind of calculation as the one above for Jupiter’s core. Earth’s mass is 6.6 x 10^24 kilograms, so the total mass of gold throughout our entire planet is about 2 quadrillion tons.
Earth contains 2 quadrillion tons of gold.
You’ll notice there’s an enormous difference between 2 quadrillion tons of total gold on Earth and 200,000 tons of recoverable gold! The mere presence of gold is not meaningful if you have no way of recovering it.
Which brings me to asteroid Psyche and those ridiculous stories that it is worth $10,000 quadrillion dollars. What does that even mean? Think how much Earth’s oceans would be worth if you could purify them and sell them all as $2 bottles of water. Think how much Earth’s crust would be worth if you could break it up into chunks and sell it all as $10 paperweights. These kinds of calculations make for fun headlines, but they make no sense. They are meaningless.
But let’s go ahead and do the gold calculation for Psyche. The mass of asteroid Psyche is 3 x 10^19 kilograms. If it is really, really gold-rich, then it is about 5 parts per million gold. That comes to 150 trillion kilograms of gold, or 150 billion tons. That’s a lot of gold compared to the recoverable reserves on Earth — but it’s tiny compared to the total amount of gold on Earth, and really really tiny compared to the amount of gold on Jupiter.
Psyche contains 150 billion tons of gold.
It currently costs about $500 million to bring 50 grams of asteroid material back to Earth. So let’s do the other calculation: How much would it take to bring all of Psyche back to Earth? Psyche’s mass is 3x10^19 kilograms. Let’s be optimistic and say we could bring the cost down to $100 million per kilogram of mass returned (ie, reduce the cost by a factor of 100 from what it costs now). Bringing all of Psyche back to Earth for processing would cost 3 x 10^27 dollars.
Bottom line: The claim is that the metals in asteroid Psyche are worth $10,000 quadrillion (10^19 dollars). But bringing pieces of Psyche back to Earth would cost $3 octillion (3 x 10^27 dollars), 300 million times as much as the asteroid is worth. You would bankrupt the planet before you could even get started.
You mean the one that has the most gold?
It’s not a planet. It’s an asteroid.
This is the asteroid 16 Psyche. It contains an estimated $700 quintillion worth of gold give or take a couple quadrillion. There’s enough gold there to make everybody on Earth rich beyond our wildest dreams. We’re talking if this was split evenly for everybody we’d all get something like 87 billion worth of gold. Except that much gold would literally make it worthless. It’s only gold’s rarity that makes it so valuable. Well… that and the fact so many people want it. Supply and demand.
EDIT: Comments turned off, very quickly, because people are missing the point. Gold has worth outside of being a precious metal but I was only talking about it’s worth as a precious metal. Telling me it’s good for this or that was never the point. We’re talking monetary value as a precious metal.
Psyche 16, nestled between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is made of solid metal. As well as gold, the mysterious object is loaded with heaps of platinum, iron and nikel. In total, it's estimated that Psyche's various metals are worth a gargantuan $11,000 quadrillion.
There is no planet completely filled with gold that we know in the universe there of gold, and no plant that is completely taken over by gold The earth has approximately 208,874 tones mined so far in history and in the universe. It’s estimated up to billion's to trillions tons of gold. A Complete gold filled planet of more or less fiction rather than actual science.
