Scientists in Europe have recreated a “little” version of what the universe may have looked like right after the Big Bang using two of the smallest atoms ever, reports said.

Right after the Big Bang, the universe was an unimaginably “hot soup” of particles called quarks and gluons, which were packed together before anything we’d recognize as matter existed, and up until this month, physicists believed recreating that soup — known as quark-gluon plasma — required smashing together heavy atoms like lead. 

But now, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute in the Netherlands have done it with oxygen-16 and neon-20 instead, which are a fraction of lead’s size, and fired them into each other at nearly the speed of light to recreate a miniature version of the Big Bang. 

European scientists created a ‘little’ Big Bang to study the universe’s origins. Julien Ordan/CERN

“We have pushed the boundary for how small the atomic nuclei can be while still re-creating this primordial matter — what you could call a ‘little big bang,’” said You Zhou, a researcher who led the study. 

“We now know more about the fundamental conditions required for matter to transition into this extreme state,” Zhou explained.

The experiment works by colliding the oxygen and neon nuclei to create a tiny blob of quark-gluon plasma — the same super-hot “soup” scientists think filled the universe right after the Big Bang.

The collision produces a droplet of that plasma that expands and cools in an instant, too fast for scientists to observe directly, so instead, scientists studied the particles it leaves behind, which turned out to reveal something unexpected, Zhou explained. 

What they found, according to the study, is when two oxygen atoms smashed together, the particles sprayed out in a rounded pattern, but when two neon atoms collided, the particles actually came out shaped more like a bowling pin — which matches the true geometry of a neon nucleus, according to the study.

An event display shows collisions between Neon-20 and Oxygen-16. University of Copenhagen.

This gave researchers an unexpected way to see the shape of an atom with the naked human eye that they could never actually observe directly. 

“Hopefully, this will help us better understand how the plasma behaved during the first moments of the universe — and how it later evolved into the forms of matter that everything around us is made of,” said Zhou. 

“By studying how the particles move after the collision, we can gain insights into atomic nuclei that are otherwise difficult for physicists to obtain,” added Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute and coauthor of the experiment. 

The research findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The results add fresh evidence for the standard Big Bang theory — though not all of the science community is convinced anymore that there was a “bang” at all.

A separate theory by another group of scientists, dubbed the “Big Bounce” and reported by The Post in April, theorizes that the universe actually rebounded out of a collapsing black hole, like a basketball bouncing off a rim, and left behind detectable traces of so in black holes today.