Is This The First Matter Ever Created After the Big Bang? Scientists Seem To Think So!

And it’s what could be called a “perfect liquid.”

Transcript

00:00 13.8 Billion Years Ago Our universe is a pretty unbelievable and

00:06 spectacular place, but now scientists say it used to be much more spectacular, or at

00:11 least much, much different than it is today.

00:14 Experts at the Large Hadron Collider recently forced lead particles together at very nearly

00:18 the speed of light, producing what they say is the first matter that the Big Bang created

00:22 13.8 billion years ago.

00:24 It's called quark-gluon plasma, a short-lived primordial type of matter that has likely

00:28 shown scientists how the universe evolved in its first moments.

00:31 The substance is a perfect liquid, flowing better than any other known matter, and it's

00:35 the fundamental building block of all things.

00:38 Gluons connect in quarks, eventually forming subatomic particles, then becoming hadrons,

00:42 protons, and neutrons.

00:43 The whole event lasted only 10^-23 seconds, a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.

00:49 But using a computer simulator and data gathering instruments, they were able to determine what

00:53 happened between the moment the lead particles collided and the moment the resulting quark-gluon

00:57 plasma condensed into hadrons, revealing what our universe was truly like in the immediate

01:02 moment after its birth.

01:04 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:07 (upbeat music)