Discover reports:

In the universe’s earliest moments, it took the form of a scalding soup filled with particles called quarks and gluons. These particles zipped through liquidy plasma for just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Now, physicists have recreated these conditions by producing tiny droplets of the same primordial soup that filled the universe right after it was born.

Making a modern version of the primordial soup — known as quark-gluon plasma — entails smashing atomic nuclei together at nearly the speed of light. This has often been done with very heavy atomic nuclei, but a new study published in Physical Review Letters has shown that similar results can be achieved with much smaller atomic nuclei. With this breakthrough, researchers are now on track to a vastly improved understanding of the earliest form of matter in the universe.

“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,” said study author You Zhou, a professor at Aarhus University, in a statement.

Right after the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago, quarks and gluons filled the newborn universe. They frantically swam through plasma, all of them melding into a smooth, frictionless fluid. And at a few trillion degrees Fahrenheit, it also had the distinction of being the hottest liquid in existence.

It only took a few millionths of a second for this soup to cool. The quarks and gluons froze into protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei — and the rest is history. [Continue reading…]