High-Speed Particle Smashing Recreates Primordial Soup Droplets From the Universe's First Moments
Learn how researchers have recreated the earliest form of matter in the universe by smashing atomic nuclei together at high speeds.
In the universe's infancy, it was a searing soup composed of quarks and gluons, which whizzed through a plasma for only a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists have replicated these conditions by generating small droplets of the same primordial soup that existed right after the universe's birth. To create a modern version of the primordial soup, known as quark-gluon plasma, physicists smash atomic nuclei together at velocities close to the speed of light.
While this has typically been done using heavy atomic nuclei, a recent study published in Physical Review Letters revealed that similar outcomes can be achieved with significantly smaller atomic nuclei. This breakthrough brings researchers closer to a deeper understanding of the earliest form of matter in the universe. Professor You Zhou from Aarhus University stated, "Hopefully, this will help us better understand how the plasma behaved during the first moments of the Universe — and how it later evolved into the forms of matter that everything around us is made of."
Written by urgent.news from Discover Magazine's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
