GENEVA
The world of science got a step closer to demystifying “dark matter” Wednesday with the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s announcement that its Large Hadron Collider started delivering data for the first time in 27 months.
"After an almost two year shutdown and several months re-commissioning, the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] is now providing collisions to all of its experiments at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV [trillion electron volts], almost double the collision energy of its first run," the European organization, known also as CERN, said in a statement.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, collides high-energy beams in experiments which examine the nature of subatomic energy.
With the on going experiments, the mystery of what physicists call the "dark matter" is hoped to be proved.
"Dark matter" is thought to make up some 96 percent of the universe as being totally invisible.
During its first run, the Large Hadron Collider detected the long-elusive Higgs boson particle, referred to as the "God particle" for its importance in understanding the nature of the cosmos, in 2012, in an outcome regarded as a major breakthrough in physics.
Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work on the Higgs boson theory, which describes the particle as an elementary one in the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Higgs boson was the final component whose existence was needed to confirm the Standard Model -- which explains the workings of the Universe at the smallest energy scales.
About the latest run of the machine, CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said in a statement: "We have seen the first data beginning to flow. Let’s see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works.”
