A little Big Bang: Bowling-pin-shaped nuclei shed new light on the universe's first moments

What happened in the first moments of the universe—before the building blocks of life and the world we know today came into existence? Physicists at the CERN research facility in Switzerland are trying to answer this question by recreating some of the extreme conditions that prevailed in the universe during its earliest history. Now, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration, have come one step closer to understanding those conditions.