Soupy Sails

Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT In this illustration a quark zooms through quark-gluon plasma, creating a wake in the plasma. In its earliest moments, the Universe was hot and dense. A plasma sea of quarks and gluons out of which hydrogen, helium, and humans eventually formed. This early cosmic state is sometimes called the primordial soup, and thanks to new research, we now know just how fitting the term is.1 Although we’ve long known of the early Big Bang, it is difficult to understand its fu...