Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Liquid Universe
There's more news today coming out of Brookhaven about their big bang experiment. Danish physicists from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen who took part in the research said that when the universe was just one microsecond old it behaved like a perfect liquid.
Until recently, researchers have thought that the quarks and gluons that appeared right after the big bang formed a gas. "The latest results from RHIC, however, indicate that under the extreme conditions just around the phase transition from quarks and gluons to ordinary matter, the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid, in fact an almost perfect liquid," the reserachers said in a press release.
The scientist said that the liquid, burning at 1,000 billion degress Kelvin seemed to move "in a pattern that exhibits a high degree of coordination among the particles -- somewhat like a school of fish that responds as one entity while moving through a changing environment."
Until recently, researchers have thought that the quarks and gluons that appeared right after the big bang formed a gas. "The latest results from RHIC, however, indicate that under the extreme conditions just around the phase transition from quarks and gluons to ordinary matter, the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid, in fact an almost perfect liquid," the reserachers said in a press release.
The scientist said that the liquid, burning at 1,000 billion degress Kelvin seemed to move "in a pattern that exhibits a high degree of coordination among the particles -- somewhat like a school of fish that responds as one entity while moving through a changing environment."
