Hadron Collider, Smash

Following three years of maintenance, upgrades and pandemic delays, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aka the world’s largest particle accelerator, is gearing up for its third – and most powerful – experimental period to date.

🤔 Why it’s a big deal… This new experimental stretch could finally reveal the long-sought "right-handed" versions of ghostly particles called neutrinos, find the elusive particles that make up dark matter, and even help to explain why the universe exists at all, LiveScience reports. So…. yeah. A pretty bfd.

⚙️⚛️ How it works: The Large Hadron Collider does just what it says on the box: smashes hadrons together at 99.99% the speed of light. Observations of the instruments have generated more than 2,000 scientific papers on many areas of fundamental particle physics.

📝 Some LHC fun facts…

• It’s the largest machine in the world; 17 miles in circumference and runs about 330 feet under the surface, spanning the border of France and Switzerland. It took 20 years of planning and $8 billion to complete.
• The most powerful supercomputer in the world; set to generate 40,000GB of data each day – or in other words, enough to download Titanic 20,000x times over (not that anyone would want to).
• Gets more than 100,00x hotter than the Sun…. but also reaches temps of -456°F.🥵 ➡️🥶

👀 Looking ahead… If all initial tests and checks starting this month go well, scientists will begin experiments in June and slowly ramp up to full power by the end of July.