The First Few Seconds Of The Big Bang

What Happened?

The first question that springs to mind is not, “What happened during the first few seconds of the Big Bang?”, but rather how can anyone possibly know what happened billions of years ago during the birth of the universe? Well, without sounding too poetic, the universe’s secrets can be found in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Colliding At CERN

By smashing sub-atomic particles together at high speeds, scientists can simulate the unique, sub-atomic conditions that existed at the start of the universe. The high-energy particle collisions yield fleeting sub-atomic byproducts that provide insights into the sub-atomic world and the laws governing it.

QGP

It has been theorised for some years that in the few milliseconds after the start of the universe there existed an exotic hot soup of elementary particles known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). A few microseconds later this particle soup began to cool to form the protons and neutrons which are the building blocks of matter (This is not to be confused with the primordial soup of organic compounds from which sprang forth life and existed billions of years later.)

For the past 20 years, scientists have been attempting to recreate this particle soup, QGP, by smashing together atoms at close to the speed of light, producing unimaginable trillion-degree temperatures. In 2005, researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory used accelerated gold atoms to create QGP. The 4 trillion-degree temperatures that ensued (250,000 times hotter than inside of the sun), were able to melt protons and neutrons into quarks and gluons, taking us back in time to the conditions at the start of the universe.

Now, one might understandably think that temperatures of 250,000 times hotter than the sun have no business being on earth. But, relax, this insanely hot QDP blob is about a trillionth of a centimetre wide and only exists for a few milliseconds and subsequently not a threat to existence.

Are We Accelerating Closer To Big Bang Answers?

In recent times, scientists at the University of Copenhagen have yielded more detailed insights into the first milliseconds of the universe following the Big Bang using the Hadron Collider. Their results found that QGP was separated into quarks and gluons by the hot expansion of the universe. The pieces of quark reformed into the hadrons, and a hadron containing 3 quarks makes a proton which is a part of atomic cores and are the building blocks of the humanity, earth and the universe.

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