THE RAREST piece of gold in the world has been analysed by scientists and they will no longer reveal its price.
Known as the Ram’s Horn, scientists have been reluctant to conduct tests on the precious wire gold artefact until now.
The Ram’s Horn was found in 1887 in a goldmine in Colorado.
It is roughly 4.7 inches tall, weighs roughly half a pound and is so delicate that it has naturally split into three tendrils.
At the time of its discovery, the gold horn was valued at around £125 by weight—or about £3,550 in today’s currency.
However, experts will no longer speculate on its current value due to security concerns.
John Rakovan, a mineralogist at Miami University, could only tell National Geographic that the object was worth “a very pretty penny.”
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Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently used a half-mile-long particle accelerator to work out whether the golden wires make up one massive gold crystal or are a few gold crystals growing together.
Wire gold is so rare and delicate that not much is known about it and that’s why this new research is so groundbreaking.
Analysis revealed that the golden horn was likely made of just a few crystals, rather than a lot of them making it an even rarer phenomenon.
The Ram’s Horn current lives in Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum.
A paper about the analysis techniques used in this study is going to be released soon and may reveal a bit more about this mysterious object.
