Very soon after the Big Bang, the universe enjoyed a brief phase where quarks and gluons roamed freely, not yet joined up ...

In the model presented in the new paper the red line shows the flow of electrons, or plasma, and the yellow line shows the sun's surface. The X enclosed by a circle shows magnetic field ...

A phase diagram of QCD would map the distribution of ordinary matter (known as hadronic matter), the quark-gluon plasma, and other possible phases of QCD such as color superconductivity.