{"id":664432,"date":"2026-08-31T01:14:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T01:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/664432\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T01:14:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T01:14:12","slug":"european-scientists-create-little-big-bang-to-study-the-universes-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/664432\/","title":{"rendered":"European scientists create ‘little Big Bang’ to study the universe\u2019s origins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists in Europe<\/a> have recreated a \u201clittle\u201d version of what the universe may have looked like right after the Big Bang using two of the smallest atoms ever, reports said.<\/p>\n

Right after the Big Bang, the universe was an unimaginably \u201chot soup\u201d of particles called quarks and gluons, which were packed together before anything we\u2019d recognize as matter existed, and up until this month, physicists believed recreating that soup \u2014 known as quark-gluon plasma \u2014 required smashing together heavy atoms like lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But now, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute<\/a> in the Netherlands have done it with oxygen-16 and neon-20 instead, which are a fraction of lead\u2019s size, and fired them into each other at nearly the speed of light to recreate a miniature version of the Big Bang.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TheEuropean scientists created a \u2018little\u2019 Big Bang to study the universe\u2019s origins. Julien Ordan\/CERN<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have pushed the boundary for how small the atomic nuclei can be while still re-creating this primordial matter \u2014 what you could call a \u2018little big bang,\u2019\u201d said You Zhou, a researcher who led the study.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now know more about the fundamental conditions required for matter to transition into this extreme state,\u201d Zhou explained.<\/p>\n

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

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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

\"IllustrationAn event display shows collisions between Neon-20 and Oxygen-16. University of Copenhagen.<\/p>\n

This gave researchers an unexpected way to see the shape of an atom with the naked human eye that they could never actually observe directly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHopefully, this will help us better understand how the plasma behaved during the first moments of the universe \u2014 and how it later evolved into the forms of matter that everything around us is made of,\u201d said Zhou.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBy studying how the particles move after the collision, we can gain insights into atomic nuclei that are otherwise difficult for physicists to obtain,\u201d added Emil Gorm Dahlb\u00e6k Nielsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute and coauthor of the experiment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The research findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The results add fresh evidence for the standard Big Bang theory \u2014 though not all of the science community is convinced anymore that there was a \u201cbang\u201d at all. <\/p>\n

A separate theory by another group of scientists, dubbed the \u201cBig Bounce\u201d and reported by The Post in April<\/a>, theorizes that the universe actually rebounded out of a collapsing black hole, like a basketball bouncing off a rim, and left behind detectable traces of so in black holes today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists in Europe have recreated a \u201clittle\u201d version of what the universe may have looked like right after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[271],"tags":[18,19,17,452,133,28849,66],"class_list":["post-664432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-the-big-bang-theory","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}