{"id":243412,"date":"2026-08-31T01:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T06:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/european-scientists-create-little-big-bang-to-study-the-universes-origins"},"modified":"2026-08-31T01:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T06:16:10","slug":"european-scientists-create-little-big-bang-to-study-the-universes-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/european-scientists-create-little-big-bang-to-study-the-universes-origins","title":{"rendered":"European scientists create \u2018little Big Bang\u2019 to study the universe\u2019s origins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/european-scientists-create-little-big-bang-to-study-the-universes-origins2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The experiment works by colliding the oxygen and neon nuclei to create a tiny blob of quark-gluon plasma \u2014 the same super-hot \u201csoup\u201d scientists think filled the universe right after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n<p>The collision produces a droplet of that plasma that expands and cools in an instant, too fast for scientists to observe directly, so instead, scientists studied the particles it leaves behind, which turned out to reveal something unexpected, Zhou explained.<\/p>\n<p>What they found, according to the study, is when two oxygen atoms smashed together, the particles sprayed out in a rounded pattern, but when two neon atoms collided, the particles actually came out shaped more like a bowling pin \u2014 which matches the true geometry of a neon nucleus, according to the study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The experiment works by colliding the oxygen and neon nuclei to create a tiny blob of quark-gluon plasma \u2014 the same super-hot \u201csoup\u201d scientists think filled the universe right after the Big Bang. The collision produces a droplet of that plasma that expands and cools in an instant, too fast for scientists to observe directly, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}