The visible Universe owes its existence to the brief moments after the Big Bang when many of the laws of physics that hold the current Universe together were broken, allowing an imbalance between visible matter and antimatter to emerge1. One of these laws is the conservation of a quantity called baryon number, which is assigned to all protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are a type of particle called a baryon, which is made up of three fundamental particles known as quarks. Writing in Science, the STAR Collaboration2 reports the strongest experimental evidence yet that baryon number is carried not by the quarks themselves but by structures called baryon junctions, which bind them together.