Plate 5: Miniature Big Bang.

Plate05_RHIC_BrookhavenPlate 5: End result of a heavy ion collision -- a miniature version of the big bang.


Using gold-ion collisions and the poetically-named "Time Projection Chamber," Brookhaven's STAR collaboration simulates and studies a quark-gluon soup very much like that of the early universe.



More about this image

Science writer Robert Adler describes a similar image at Astronomy.com:


"An end-on view of one of the first full-energy collisions between gold ions at Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), as captured by the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) detector. The collisions create a quark-gluon soup that reproduces the state of the universe less than 10 microseconds after the Big Bang. The tracks indicate paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced in the collisions as they pass through STAR's 3-D digitial camera."


Use of this image requires prior authorization from Brookhaven National Laboratory's STAR collaboration.