Do gold and silver react well with the elements and compounds in the air?

You know the drill about research on the Internet well enough - in fact, far better than most here do. Type keywords such as 'gold', 'silver' into google or wikipedia. That's where you'll get the most accurate answers.

Here's a starter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold

Since I'm creating a work of fiction I an trying to think of what what would be some ideal synthentic substances as a result of gold combining with a component or components of the air and silver combining with a component or components of the air?

Please help me out.

From http://www.docbrown.info/page03/Reactivity.htm :

properties of silver and other info:

No reaction when heated in air.

No reaction with cold water or when heated in steam.

No reaction with dilute hydrochloric acid or dilute sulphuric acid.
Silver reacts with hot concentrated sulfuric acid to form silver sulfate and sulfur dioxide gas.
Silver reacts with hot concentrated nitric acid to form silver nitrate and gaseous nitrogen oxides.
Silver can be extracted by BUT can be found 'native' as the element because it is so unreactive. It has been used from pre-historic times in jewellery for 4000 years at least.
In Anglo-Saxon it was 'siolfur' meaning 'silver in nature' and in Latin 'Argentum' hence its symbol Ag.
Its very low reactivity makes it a valuable jewellery metal as it doesn't corrode easily and retains its attractive silvery appearance.

properties of gold and other info:

No reaction when heated in air

No reaction with cold water or when heated in steam.

No reaction with dilute hydrochloric acid or dilute sulphuric acid.

Gold will react with, and dissolve in, a mixture of concentrated nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid to form gold(III) chloride.

Gold can be readily extracted from its ores easily by reduction BUT it is usually found 'native' as the element because it is so unreactive and has been used from pre-historic times in jewellery for at least 6000 years. Known in Anglo-Saxon as 'gold'. Gold is rather a soft metal and is 'hardened' by alloying with other metals - pure gold is 24 carat - 22, 18, 15, 12 and 9 carat gold are legalised, meaning it has that carat number/24 as parts of gold as a measure of its purity and value! 24/24 to 9/24 fraction of gold!
Its extremely low reactivity makes it a valuable jewellery metal as it doesn't corrode easily and retains its shiny attractive yellow appearance.

silver reacts with sulfur compounds in the atmosphere and tarnishes. gold pretty much doesn't react with almost anything it normally comes in contact with and stays untarnished. http://www.chemicool.com/elements/silver.html