The collisions will happen under enough heat and pressure to melt protons and neutrons and release their components (quarks and gluons), creating quark-gluon plasma. Quark-gluon plasma was thought to have emerged during the Big Bang, and could tell us more about conditions in the nascent universe. As part of CERN’s ATLAS experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now crashing oxygen ions into each other, and will soon be doing the same with neon ions. During those very early moments of the universe, things were extraordinarily hot, and quark-gluon plasma behaves in strange ways when super-heated. Jet quenching, for one, occurs when highly energetic particle jets begin to lose energy as they zoom through quark-gluon plasma.