Question: is gold only 1 bunch of matter?

Michael Gillin answered on 23 Feb 2026:

A piece of gold, like a nugget or a fancy piece of jewellery, is made out of tiny particles called atoms. All gold is made from the same type of atom, called a gold atom. This means that gold is an element (you can find it on the periodic table of elements!), which is a pure substance made of only one type of atom.

But a piece of gold, like a ring, contains billions and billions of gold atoms joined together.

Scientists estimate that humans have mined about 200,000 tonnes of gold in all of history. If you were to melt it all down and make one giant cube out of it, it would be about 22 metres tall, 22 metres wide, and 22 metres deep. That isn’t actually that big!