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