Big Success For 'Big Bang' Experiment

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s most powerful “Big Bang Experiment.” Scientists just performed the first LHC exeriment and it went off without a hitch, sending a beam of particles called protons down a 27-kilometer long tunnel.

The LHC project took three decades to complete, costing nearly £5 billion ($8.83 billion USD) and involving thousands of engineers and scientists from more than 100 countries. But all those efforts are paying off in the end, as the first beam of protons was successfully sent down the 27-kilometer (16.78 miles) long tunnel near the Swiss-French border. The LHC is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and scientists are hoping it will help them understand fundamental questions in physics. The first beam of protons was sent around the long ring successfully without incident. But the project has not been without controversy, and scientists at LHC have even received death threats, after some people feared the world would end if they performed this “Big Bang” experiment. Another beam of protons will now get sent in a counter-clockwise direction, and after that, two beams of protons will get sent in opposite directions so they can smash into each other at high speeds (close to speed of light). Scientists say this will recreate the earliest conditions in the Universe, just moments after the Big Bang. Dr. Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool, told the BBC:

We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang...We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before."

The 27-km tunnel contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end. These magnets steer the proton beams around the long ring. During the collision experiment, the two proton beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive “detectors” that will monitor the collisions for interesting events. Scientists hope new sub-atomic particles might be created during the collision, possibly revealing more about the nature of the cosmos. The LHC will answer questions about the mass of the particles in the cosmos. As the BBC reports:

The currently favored model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.

Astronomical observations have suggested galaxies, gas, stars and planets make up only 4 per cent of the Universe. The remaining is dark matter (23 per cent) and dark energy (73 per cent). Scientists hope they will be able to detect the mass of the mysterious stuff in Cosmos.