Computer display showing the tracks of hundreds of charged subatomic particles created in, and radiating outwards from, a collision of two 30-billion electron-volt gold beams in the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The collider aims to recreate the soup-like plasma of quarks and gluons which is believed to have existed millionths of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe first formed.