How is a quark formed?
You were probably taught in school that the smallest unit of matter is the atom. And then later that atoms are composed of smaller units called electrons, protons, and neutrons.
That's all we thought existed until 50 or so years ago. Then we found ways of breaking apart and looking inside even protons and neutrons, and found they're made of even smaller particles called quarks.
Quarks are subatomic particles. Most of the ones you see were formed by the Big Bang, but quarks can be created with a sufficient amount of energy.
The quarks and gluons are excitations of fundamental quantum fields which exist everywhere in space. The QGP (quark–gluon plasma) was just a consequence of the extremely high initial temperature of these fields, which manifested as a large number of quarks and gluons. When the universe cooled off a bit, those excitations couldn't exist freely all over the place and were confined to bound states (protons, neutrons, etc.).
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