And Man Said: ” Let There Be Light” [Image Cache]

You’re now watching the beginning of the Universe. Or better said, a small scale version of what scientists think happened one millionth of a second after the Big Bang , created throughout the 16.77-mile acceleration ring of the Large Hadron Collider .

The objective of the experiments-as a way to be happening for a better four weeks-is to check how the Universe can have formed at the very beginning. Until know, the LHC has been used to conduct proton-smashing experiments designed to find the Force . It’s the first time that the LHC has crashed ions against each other.

These first images show the consequences at ALICE (a huge Ion Collider Experiment), ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), which have scientists-like ALICE’s David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK-pretty excited:

This process came about in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons called a quark-gluon plasma.

Yes, nothing like creating dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun to make a physicist happy. That and fresh quark-gluon plasma pizza. [ CERN and CERN via Symmetry Breaking and BBC News ]

Source

This post is tagged: beginning of the universe, compact muon solenoid, protons and neutrons, toroidal lhc apparatus, university of birmingham