The Large Hadron Collider successfully created a “mini-Big Bang” on Nov 7 by smashing together lead ions instead of protons and creating temperatures of more than ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the center of the Sun.

They hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang by studying the quark-gluon plasma generated in the experiment, specifically the “strong force,” which binds the nuclei of atoms together and is responsible for 98% of their mass.