LHC milestone: As dense as it gets.

Digital Journal reports that the Large Hadron Collider has another superlative to stick in its yearbook. As well as being “most likely to succeed” and “most likely to create a black hole,” it’s also just beat out neutron stars in creating the densest matter ever directly observed:

This exotic material may be the parent of all known matter.
This super hot form of matter was observed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and is known as known as quark-gluon plasma. This form of matter is as dense as a neutron star, and more than 100,000 times as hot as our sun. Quark-gluon plasma may in fact be what the entire universe was made of in it’s infancy.

“Besides black holes, there’s nothing denser than what we’re creating,” said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and a team leader for the LHC’s ALICE detector, which helped observe the quark-gluon plasma.
“If you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons.”

“Quark-Gluon Plasma” is a great piece of terminology. Doesn’t it sound sticky and primal?