EYE OPENER

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Weighing 1,200 tonnes and as large as a house, this is the Solenoidal Tracker (STAR). One of four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), it tracks the thousands of particles produced by ion collisions at the RHIC, which is capable of colliding ions as atomically heavy as gold.

These collisions have resulted in the creation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which has been hailed as the ‘perfect liquid’. Reaching temperatures of four trillion degrees Celsius – many thousands of times hotter than the centre of the Sun – this perfect liquid provides a rare glimpse of the hot, dense states of matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled, the quarks and their gluon bonds coalesced into subatomic protons and neutrons, which constitute the nuclei of atoms that make up all ordinary matter today.

Physicists hope that by understanding QGP, we may better understand the early Universe itself.