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04/19/2005:

"Early universe may have been fluid:-"

Washington, April 19 : New research suggests that the early universe was a hot, dense liquid made of basic atomic particles, overturning the widely held belief that fiery gas existed immediately after the "big bang" that created the cosmos.

Researchers from the High Energy and Nuclear Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, created quark-gluon plasma in a particle collider, Xinhua reported.

Quarks are the most basic particles that make up matter and they are normally bound together. But in their experiment, the researchers smashed two gold ions together at speeds similar to that of light and with such force that it allowed the quarks to separate and roam freely.

The intense collision briefly generated trillion-degree temperatures, an extreme temperature condition thought to have only existed microseconds after the "big bang."

The researchers found that in this environment the quarks behaved like a "perfect" liquid instead of flying around freely like a gas as they expected.

By "perfect" the scientists implied that liquid had the lowest possible viscosity. Viscosity is an internal property of a fluid that offers resistance to flow.

Researchers said the findings had revised the belief of physicists that fiery gas existed microseconds after the "big bang".
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