What is the Rarest Substance in the Universe?
The rarest substance is the universe is probably the quark-gluon plasma or something like it. This is a phase of matter generated only under the most intense temperatures and pressures. For most of the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the explosive event that created our universe, all matter was in the form of a quark-gluon plasma. Quarks and gluons are particles that make up nucleons like neutrons and protons, which in turn make up the atoms that constitute all matter. Quarks are the particles with mass, while gluons are the force-mediating particles that “glue” the quarks together. Though the quark-gluon plasma is currently a contender for the rarest substance in the universe, at its start, it was the normal state of matter. A quark-gluon plasma is a bath of almost-free quarks and gluons, which typically are tightly locked into nucleons. Conventional nucleons are so tightly held together that even a nuclear explosion or the temperature and pressure at the core of the S
