Scientists say the tiny bubbles of plasma they’ve created in a “big bang machine” are the hottest dollops of soup ever seen in the universe, reaching temperatures of several trillion degrees.

What’s more, the weird properties of that soup may help scientists create a new breed of electronic devices – and figure out why the universe didn’t blow itself up as soon as it came into being.

The proton-sized soup bubbles, known more formally as quark-gluon plasma, were created about a billion times in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Like the larger, more recently constructed Large Hadron Collider, RHIC is capable of creating the conditions that existed in the universe a millionth of a second after the big bang.

Read the full article on MSNBC.COM.

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