Hadron collider, smash

Following three years of maintenance, upgrades, and pandemic delays, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aka the world’s largest particle accelerator, was switched back on yesterday. It’ll stay running for the next four years.

🤔 Why that’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. Kind of a big deal.

• Case in point: Yesterday, hours after the machine was turned on, the physics lab housing the LHC announced the observation of three new “exotic particles” that could provide clues about the force that binds subatomic particles together.

⚙️⚛️ How it works… The Large Hadron Collider does just what it says on the box: smashes hadrons (subatomic particles) together at 99.99% the speed of light. Scientists then get to observe what happens; these observations have generated 3,000 scientific papers on many areas of fundamental particle physics, including the discovery of the Higgs boson.

• The atom smasher is also the most powerful supercomputer in the world, set to generate 40,000GB of data each day – or in other words, enough to download the James Cameron classic Titanic 20,000x times over (not that anyone would want to).

+Fun fact: All that computing power means it gets hot. Like, real hot. To talk specifics, the LHC reaches temps of more than 100,000x hotter than the Sun… but it also gets cold, too, reaching temps as low as -456°F.🥵 ➡️🥶