Quark Soup!

One of the biggest unsolved puzzles in physics remains exactly how the matter in the universe got from the singularity of the Big Bang to the relatively complex set of particles we have today.

Experiments in high- energy colliders around the world (including the Large Hadron Collider), have yielded hints and clues about a state - physicists call it a "system" - called a quark-gluon plasma or quark soup.

Normally, particles like protons and neutrons are made up of several quarks bound together by gluons. Pull apart a proton, and rather than the quarks moving apart, more quarks appear. It's weird. But make a system hot enough (two trillion de- grees) and quarks no longer stick together, they move around in a liquid-like soup.

Physicists think this resembles the very early universe, fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Making quark soup should allow them to further refine their theories about how the universe began.

These are quark-gluon plasma droplets, which form into different shapes depending on the type of the 'projectile' used in a collider.