We Now Know What the Beginning of Time Looked Like: Goop
Scientists believe the beginning of time included the ingredients of atoms, protons, and neutrons, dubbed quarks.
At the start of the universe, some believe the quarks floated in a fluid with gluon particles.
Scientists haven't been able to find this quark-gluon plasma, until now.
The beginning of time—whenever and however that happened—is a nebulous construct that scientists have long sought to sort. But researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island believe using a Heavy Ion Collider (REIC) has helped provide clarity—and a view into what the beginning of time actually looked like.
In a Scientific American report, the scientists at Brookhaven believe using a particle accelerator opened a view into the soup that was potentially part of our brand-new universe.
In one theory, a Big Bang event billions of years ago created a universe so new that atoms weren’t even a reality. This hot—as in, hotter-than-the sun hot—world held the ingredients of atoms, protons, and neutrons in what is called quarks. When you mixed in a fluid with gluon particles that were able to “carry the force that holds them together inside of their proton and neutron homes,” the result was dubbed the quark-gluon plasma.
But this was just a theory—something we hadn’t before seen. Brookhaven made it visible.
The 2.4-mile-long REIC can send particles up to 99.995 percent the speed of light. Pair that with superconducting magnets and the collisions at REIC have exploded particles at high enough speeds to produce “tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma.”
Using the power of the enhanced REIC, scientists are pairing supercomputers running simulations to get a better understanding of the more powerful forces in nature, known as the quantum chromodynamic theory.
“As human beings, we want to understand nature, and part of understanding nature is to understand quantum chromodynamics and the strong force,” says physicist Haiyan Gao, associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven, via SciAm. “We need to do experiments on quark-gluon plasma to understand how this theory works.”
As the excitement heats up, so do the experiments. “This is what filled the entire universe about 10 microseconds after the big bang,” Bjoern Schenke, a Brookhaven theoretical physicist, tells SciAm. “Studying it allows us to go back in time as much as we possibly can.”
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