Scientist claim to have recreated Big Bang in lab

Geneva: Scientists say they have created a mini Big Bang using the world's largest atom smasher, resulting in a temperature "a millions times hotter" than the sun's center.

Mini versions of the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe almost 13.7 billion years ago, have been created within the Large Hadron Collider, the giant machine probing the nature of matter near Geneva, Switzerland.

Scientists said a tiny ball of matter exploded and then quickly formed a melted "soup" of matter, which then re-ordered itself into what is now the universe.

The experiment, using lead ions instead of protons, produced the highest densities and temperatures ever created by scientists, and a kind of matter formerly unseen on Earth, The Telegraph reports.

"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt, resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma," researcher David Evans from the University of Birmingham told the BBC.

The Guardian explained that the moment the scientists are re-creating happened about 0.00000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, an interval when "protons and neutrons can't even stay whole."

Scientists are also trying to figure out more about the "strong force," which binds the nuclei of atoms and gives them most of their mass.