![]() This will be achieved, CERN says, by accelerating and colliding together two beams of heavy ions, an epic scientific event that will take place next month. How hot you ask? Well, about as hot as conditions in the Universe after the Big Bang, or more than 100,000-times the temperature at the center of the Sun. There may be another reason for the CERN super collider being buried hundreds of feet underground: The unbelievable hot temperatures it can reach. According to the CERN website, if the filaments were unraveled, they would “stretch to the Sun and back five times with enough left over for a few trips to the Moon.” 8. The 27km length of the LHC demands some 7,600 km (4,100 miles) of cable, which amounts to about 270,000 km (145,000 miles) of strand - more than enough to circle the Earth six times at the Equator. ![]() ![]() ![]() No less amazing are the magnet’s coils, which are made up of 36 twisted 15mm strands, each strand comprised in turn of 6000-9000 single filaments, each filament possessing a diameter as small as 7 micrometers. Travelling just below light-speed, a proton in the LHC will make 11,245 circuits every second. A beam might rotate for up to 10 hours, travelling a distance of more than 10 billion kilometers, enough to make it to the far reaches of our Solar System and back again. The CERN collider is composed of some 9,600 super magnets – which are 100,000 times more powerful than the gravitational pull of Earth - that fire protons around a circular track at mindboggling speeds. Technicians are seen working in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), during a media visit to the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva in Switzerland © Pierre Albouy © Reuters 9. They also say it was buried out of respect for the natural landscape, which sounds slightly ironic considering the massive damage the collider could possibly cause down the road. Scientists involved in the project say the laboratory was built underground because the Earth’s crust provides protection against radiation. The tunnel complex runs along a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circuit. Straddling the French-Swiss border, the $9 billion CERN collider complex is buried at a depth of up to 575 feet (175 meters). Today, however, CERN is more famous – or perhaps infamous is the better word - for an upcoming experiment in which scientists will play God in an effort to recreate the conditions immediately following the ‘Big Bang’ event that gave birth to the Universe millions of years ago.įor those who are in the dark about CERN and the controversial objectives it hopes to achieve, here is a quick primer. In September, Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will smash together sub-atomic particles at nearly the speed of light, an unprecedented experiment that has some of the leading voices in the world of science - and religion - sounding the alarm on the risks involved.ĬERN is perhaps most famous for its discovery in 2012 of the elusive Higgs Boson, the so-called ‘God particle,’ which allows other particles to build up mass as they pass through the Higgs field.
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