The STAR detector at Brookhaven National Lab specializes in tracking the thousands of particles produced by each ion collision at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

Weighing 1,200 tons and as large as a house, STAR consists mainly of 12 subsystems. It is used to search for signatures of the form of matter that RHIC was designed to create: the quark-gluon plasma (QGP).