Something strange is happening at CERN no one can explain
The notion of a man-made machine exploring the very structure of the universe is a strange
thing to think about, even though science often aims to help us understand the world
around us better.
Still, some believe there are mad scientists who hope to transport us to an alternate universe,
springboard toward the gates of hell or even harness the power of a black hole.
On July 5, CERN fired up their large particle accelerator, leading many to speculate about
the more unknown implications of scientific experimentation and the secrets of the vast
universe.
So, Will CERN's latest project help us make bold new discoveries?
Or will it make us meet our ultimate demise?
Let’s talk about it!
Welcome to Cosmos Lab.
Your one station for all the news from space.
Join us in today’s video to find out what is happening insider CERN that no one can
explain.
Located on the Franco-Swiss border, CERN is officially known as the European Organization
for Nuclear Research.
This might be the first time you have heard of CERN, but the organization has actually
been around for a while.
Founded in 1952, the organization is known for providing world-class physics research
with a focus on understanding the atom.
But what is CERN’s relationship with atoms?
Before we dive into that we need to understand What Is the Large Hadron Collider?
Located at the CERN's particle physics laboratory just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, the Large
Hadron Collider, otherwise known as LHC, is essentially a mighty atom smasher.
According to CERN, the LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
Using a ring of superconducting magnets, it was designed by scientists to test theoretical
predictions in particle physics.
Scientists hope the LHC will help them get answers to questions such as: What is dark
matter?
What is dark energy?
Why is there more matter than anti-matter?
Now that we are aware of what CERN is, let’s talk about what’s going on inside this gigantic
laboratory.
Recent Mashable report from physicists announced they had discovered three "exotic" particles
they could not explain.
According to the news, Physicists at the world’s largest atom collider have observed three
new exotic particles as they continue to search for clues about the mysterious forces that
bind subatomic particles together.
The observation of the particles—a new type of pentaquark and the first duo of tetraquarks—came
on a momentous day at CERN, the Geneva lab, which also fired up its Large Hadron Collider
again, after a three-year hiatus, with the machine’s most powerful beam of energy yet.
The restart, following painstaking maintenance and repairs, offers another chance for a global
network of scientists to look for the “strong force” that holds together the nuclei of
atoms.
The strong force is one of four forces that govern the decay of particles, including the
electromagnetic force, gravity, and the “weak force.”
This month also marks the 10th anniversary of the confirmation of the Higgs boson, a
milestone at CERN that helped to solidify the so-called Standard Model, which accounts
for the basics of particle physics.
The Higgs, named for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who theorized it, helps give all
matter its mass, and is thought to have been present at the creation of the universe, moments
after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
But physicists still have questions about the Higgs, and they’re looking beyond the
Standard Model.
It’s the most comprehensive one we have, but it doesn’t explain where gravity comes
from, what dark matter is, or why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the
universe.
But how does LHC actually work?
Around LHC’s giant underground ring, stretching beneath 27-kilometers of countryside across
the Swiss-French border, a series of superconducting magnets help propel subatomic particles to
near light speed in order to smash them together as powerfully as possible.
In particle accelerators like this, slamming protons together at high energy can produce
tiny fragments of the universe not normally seen.
As in a car crash, where more explosive collisions result in smaller fragments, the higher the
energy, the higher chance that the LHC’s detectors will be able to help researchers
pick up traces of the tiniest, most exotic particles.
Along with new magnets—which must be kept at a cool -271.3°C, just colder than outer
space—CERN’s engineers have turned the beams of protons up to unprecedented energies,
to produce collision energies of 13.6 trillion electron volts, up from 13 TeV in the previous
run.
One trillion electron volts is roughly the energy of a flying mosquito, but for a subatomic
particle, that’s a lot of energy: CERN says the beams racing around the ring will eventually
carry as much as energy as a train going at 150 kilometers per hour.
In addition, The particle beams will be denser too, further increasing the probability of
a collision, and the chance of producing Higgs bosons, finding new particles, and perhaps
new physics.
Among the highly sought-after prizes is the axion, a particle thought to not emit, absorb,
or reflect light.
It’s one leading contender for the make-up of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that
physicists think accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe.
Talking about the newly discovered particles, The first-ever pair of tetraquarks and the
new pentaquark, discovered in torrents of data gathered during previous research at
the LHC, will help explain how subatomic particles form.
The particles that make up the mass of most ordinary matter, like the protons and neutrons
that make up the nuclei of atoms, are known as hadrons, and the more exotic hadrons are
made up of two or three elemental particles called quarks.
But six decades ago, physicists began theorizing that, in rare cases, these combos can form
four-quark and five-quark particles.
Only in the past decade have these so-called tetraquarks and pentaquarks actually been
observed by the LHC and other experiments.
The new pentaquark is the first found to contain a strange quark.
“We’re witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a ‘particle zoo’
of hadrons started being discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional hadrons
in the 1960s,” physicist Niels Tuning said in a statement.
“We’re creating ‘particle zoo 2.0.'”
Therefore, Specifically, the new findings will help theorists develop a unified model
of exotic hadrons, and better understand conventional hadrons.
While some theories describe exotic hadrons as “balls” of tightly bound quarks, other
theoretical models imagine them as pairs of standard hadrons that are loosely bound in
a molecule-like structure.
So, more research is required to know if either or both theories are true.
Adding to this, Researchers at CERN said the pentaquark finding has a whopping statistical
significance of 15 standard deviations, way beyond the 5 standard deviations that are
required by the physics community to claim the observation of a particle.
The new tetraquarks, observed with a statistical significance of 6.5 and 8 standard deviations
respectively, are the first time a pair of tetraquarks has been observed.
Now we can see why CERN is really important yet complicated but why do people believe
CERN’s LHC will end the world?
As is the case with many things today, it all starts with rumors shared on social media.
The July 5th ignition of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is no different, as a fake report
which detailed an alleged black hole accident recently made the rounds.
It didn’t take long before many were convinced that on July 5th when CERN turns on their
collider, the world would witness either the creation of a black hole or the opening of
a portal to another dimension.
Indeed, some went as far as to suggest that the world would come to an abrupt end all
together.
So, What’s the real deal with CERN’s LHC?
Although the doom and gloom of current world affairs is more than enough to make you think
that we’re living during the ‘end of days,’ the reality is the rumors surrounding the
apparent death machine that CERN is about to turn on are completely false.
Many will of course point to the fact that the machine hasn’t been turned on since
2018 when CERN shut it down, but according to the company itself it was simply a matter
of maintenance.
That’s right, as much as it pains us to say it, there won’t be any planetary implosion
or alien life forms streaming out of a porta, as CERN prepares to initiate its third trial
of the machine.
Though countless folk will point to a social media post - since removed - which seemed
to indicate that CERN apologized for ending the world in 2012, such talk has - we said
it before - proven to be untrue.
To be clear at no point has CERN given any statement regarding an accident, but that
hasn’t stopped users on social media from imagining the worst.
As for what CERN is actually doing, Andreas Hoecker, spokesperson of CERN’s ATLAS collaboration
states on their website that “Scientists will study the properties of
matter under extreme temperature and density.
...We will measure the strengths of the Higgs boson interactions with matter and force particles
to unprecedented precision, and we will further our searches for Higgs boson decays to dark
matter particles as well as searches for additional Higgs bosons.”
Doesn’t sound apocalyptic at all.
With that, we have come to the end of our video.
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