Scientists have created a never-before seen type of exotic matter that is thought to have been present at the earliest stages of the universe, right after the Big Bang.
The new matter is a particularly weird form of antimatter, which is like a mirror-image of regular matter. Every normal particle is thought to have an antimatter partner, and if the two come into contact, they annihilate.
The recent feat of matter-tinkering was accomplished by smashing charged gold atoms at each other at super-high speeds in a particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.
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