Large Hadron Collider Creates Mini Versions of ‘Big Bang’ !!!

November 8, 2010 by Nataly in Science

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“Big Bang” which gave birth to the universe about 14 billion years ago, now got its mini version which was successfully created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant machine probing the nature of matter near Geneva, Switzerland.

The “Mini Bangs” were produced by smashing together lead ions together at enormous energies. The experiment created temperatures of about ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

A member of the UK team from the University of Birmingham, Dr David Evans said: “We are thrilled with the achievement. The collisions generated mini Big Bangs and the highest temperatures and densities ever achieved in an experiment… This process took place in a safe, controlled environment generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over 10 trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun. At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma.”

So far, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator – which is run by Cern (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe’s formation.

For the next four weeks, researches at the LHC will concentrate on analysing the data obtained from the lead ion collisions and they hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.