Physicists recreated the first millisecond after the Big Bang — and found it was surprisingly soupy

A colorful image shows a opalescent sphere carving a streak through a rainbow colored surface, kicking up white streaks behind it.

Heavy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have revealed the faintest trace of a wake left by a quark slicing through trillion-degree nuclear matter — hinting that the primordial soup of the universe may have literally been more soup-like than we thought.

The new findings from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration show the first clear evidence of a subtle "dip" in particle production behind a high-energy quark as it traverses quark-gluon plasma — a droplet of primordial matter thought to have filled the universe microseconds after the Big Bang.