Using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, scientists have discovered that the trillion-degree hot primordial "soup" that filled the cosmos for mere millionths of a second after the Big Bang actually behaved like a liquid, making it akin to a literal soup.
This primordial soup was composed of a plasma of particles called quarks and gluons that rapidly cooled, causing these two types of particles to fuse and create fundamental particles like protons and neutrons, which today sit at the heart of all atoms that make up the matter all around us. Today, quarks and gluons are only found locked up in the particles they comprise, with one exception. By smashing together heavy atoms of lead traveling at near-light speeds using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists can create a high-energy environment that briefly frees gluons and quarks from this atomic bondage, recreating the quark-gluon plasma of the early universe.
