Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Early Universe was a liquid

The Universe consisted of a perfect liquid in its first moments, according to results from an atom-smashing experiment.
Scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, have spent five years searching for the quark-gluon plasma that is thought to have filled our Universe in the first microseconds of its existence. Most of them are now convinced they have found it. But, strangely, it seems to be a liquid rather than the expected hot gas.
Quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, and gluons carry the strong force that binds them together. It is thought that these particles took some moments to condense into ordinary matter after the intense heat of the Big Bang.

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