In an experiment to collide lead nuclei at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a team of British physicists discovered that the early Universe was not only extremely hot and dense, but also had the consistency of a liquid .
Using the ALICE detector, David Evans of the University of Birmingham and his team recreated the conditions in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang and generated subatomic fireballs at temperatures in excess of 10 trillion degrees Celsius . In this way, Evans and his colleagues have been able to verify that under these conditions the Universe behaved like a super-hot liquid. Furthermore, their work reveals that when this "primeval soup" cools, thousands of different particles emerge from the fireballs, many more than the theoretical physical models predicted. "Although it is still early days, we are learning a lot about the early Universe," admits Evans.
