A new particle detector has passed a crucial test that shows it is ready to detect the "ashes" left over from a unique primordial soup that filled the universe immediately after the Big Bang.

The sPHENIX detector is the latest experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) ring accelerator located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. The second most powerful particle accelerator in the world, after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the RHIC smashes together protons and ions of heavy elements like gold at speeds approaching the speed of light to create "quark-gluon plasma," the state of matter that existed fleetingly after the Big Bang.

This state of matter exists only at extremely high temperatures and densities and is a "soup" of free quarks and gluons, the fun

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