From Cosmic Soup to Galaxies: New CERN Data Rewrites the Big Bang Story

The Universe did not begin with a simple explosive burst, but rather as a pot of extremely dense "soup.” In the first moments after the Big Bang, reality resembled a boiling ocean of quarks and gluons. From this primordial broth eventually emerged hydrogen, helium, stars-and ultimately, us. Scientists long debated whether this initial chaos behaved like a gas or something else entirely. New data from CERN now provides a clear answer: the early Universe behaved like a true liquid. A Microcosm in the Collider: Recreating the Big Bang Understanding the nature of the early Universe on paper alone is nearly impossible. It is like trying to calculate the taste of soup by studying the formula of water. Theoretical models offer only a rough outline. On Earth, no substance naturally exists at such extreme density and temperature. The only solution is to recreate these conditions artificially by colliding particles in accelerators. "Collisions of heavy ions at near-light speeds create quark-gluon plasma for a fraction of a second. We cannot observe it directly, but we study the cascade of particles it produces-like splashes of water after a stone hits the surface," explained physicist Dmitry Lapshin in an interview with Pravda.Ru.