Article Posted on : - Nov 27, 2010

Large Hadron Collider. A file photo.

GENEVA (BNS): An experiment to recreate the conditions of Big Bang has suggested that the universe was a super-hot liquid in the moments immediately after its birth.

According to media reports, the results of the experiment have surprised physicists as they contradict the accepted view of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the creation of the universe, that the Big Bang threw out a superheated gas that clumped together to form matter.

Scientists working at the world's largest particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, in Switzerland, have discovered that an exotic soup more than 10 trillion degrees Celsius in temperature was created immediately after the birth of the universe.

This sticky, gloopy substance, known as a quark-gluon plasma, behaved like a hot liquid, according to their results.

This provided the perfect environment for the first particles and atoms to form, which later led to the stars and galaxies that surround us today.

"In the very first instances of the universe, it was actually behaving like a very dense liquid," the Telegraph quoted Dr David Evans, a particle physicist at the University of Birmingham who is the UK's lead investigator in the experiment, as saying.

"These results are telling us about the evolution of the early universe, which inevitably will have had implications for how the universe looks today.

"We have got to do a lot more analysis and put a lot more thought in to understanding this, but it is a really fascinating result," he added.