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Is it soup yet?
Jun. 19th, 2003 08:15 amPhysicists Re-create Primordial Soup
Physicists said Wednesday they had created a new form of matter strongly resembling the stuff of the universe one-thousandth of a second after its birth.
This matter is called quark-gluon plasma and physicists believe it is key in understanding both the dawn of the universe and the interior of atomic nuclei.
"The matter we have created has properties that have never before been observed," said William Zajc of Columbia University, one of hundreds of researchers working on the project at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Whether this new matter actually qualifies as the long-sought quark-gluon plasma is an issue for debate, but all of the scientists who heard the evidence agreed that what they've seen so far looks good.
[...] Quark-gluon plasma offers a glimpse at both the birth of the universe 13 billion years ago and the incredibly tiny realm inside atomic nuclei today.
Since its birth, the universe has gradually cooled from more than 100 trillion degrees to today's relatively frigid conditions. As temperatures fell below about a trillion degrees, quarks and gluons went from a free state into the confines of protons and neutrons. By reversing that process, even for only an instant, physicists hope to learn how it occurred.
( Read more... )
Physicists said Wednesday they had created a new form of matter strongly resembling the stuff of the universe one-thousandth of a second after its birth.
This matter is called quark-gluon plasma and physicists believe it is key in understanding both the dawn of the universe and the interior of atomic nuclei.
"The matter we have created has properties that have never before been observed," said William Zajc of Columbia University, one of hundreds of researchers working on the project at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Whether this new matter actually qualifies as the long-sought quark-gluon plasma is an issue for debate, but all of the scientists who heard the evidence agreed that what they've seen so far looks good.
[...] Quark-gluon plasma offers a glimpse at both the birth of the universe 13 billion years ago and the incredibly tiny realm inside atomic nuclei today.
Since its birth, the universe has gradually cooled from more than 100 trillion degrees to today's relatively frigid conditions. As temperatures fell below about a trillion degrees, quarks and gluons went from a free state into the confines of protons and neutrons. By reversing that process, even for only an instant, physicists hope to learn how it occurred.
( Read more... )